Posts Tagged ‘David Cameron’

I could fill books with this very important stuff. I mean, it’s only about if we are going to survive as a civilized society or not. Nobody of our “dear” international politicians and “leaders” seems to care very much. But I am going to try to be “brief”.

So back to the whole “system” of rules and law on which the international “peace and order” has been built on since 1945. In reality it goes back even further to the Peace of Westphalia 1648.

Westphalian sovereignty is the principle of international law that each nation-state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers, on the principle of non-interference in another country’s domestic affairs, and that each state (no matter how large or small) is equal in international law.

And ALL these international organizations and laws (UN, EU etc.,) that were supposed to guarantee peace and stability and economic progress, is in complete shambles. Why? Because all the “big ones” in Europe and the USA have done absolutely nothing to defend it besides some rhetoric and symbolic sanctions. That costs nothing for them and has very little effect.

By doing nothing, they have opened up the Pandora’s Box and a free for all to “intervene” anywhere in the world where there are at least one minority person. And that applies to EVER country and territory in the world. If not you just surreptitiously transport one there, (preferably one from your own intelligence agency or military), let him became “spokesperson” for the group. And voila, you have a just cause to “intervene with brutal force and take whatever you want.

In Russia ALONE there are over 185 officially recognizedethnic groups, nearly 20% of the Russian population.

You Reap What You Sow

Now you take this new world model and apply it to every country in the world. And what do you get? Total chaos and slaughter – “Survival of the fittest” military style.

The village of Nikishyne

On an equally important side not regarding The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances signed on December 5 1994.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, newly independent Ukraine suddenly found itself in possession of the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. (About 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads designed to strike the U.S. and 2,500 shorter-range nuclear weapons).

Though the new government originally planned to keep the Soviet nuclear weapons it had inherited on its territory, Ukraine eventually agreed to transfer the weapons to Russia for reprocessing. USA played a big part behind the scene to make them relinquish their nuclear weapons.

Under the memorandum, Ukraine promised to remove all Soviet-era nuclear weapons from its territory, send them to disarmament facilities in Russia, and sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Ukraine kept these promises.

In return, Russia and the Western signatory countries ,(Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, along with Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and John Major), essentially consecrated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine as an independent state. They did so by applying the principles of territorial integrity and nonintervention in 1975 Helsinki Final Act — a Cold War-era treaty signed by 35 states including the Soviet Union — to an independent post-Soviet Ukraine.

In the ”Budapest Memorandum,” Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States promised that none of them would ever threaten or use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine. They also pledged that none of them would ever use economic coercion to subordinate Ukraine to their own interest.

They specifically pledged they would refrain from making each other’s territory the object of military occupation or engage in other uses of force in violation of international law.

France and China also provided Ukraine with assurances similar to the Budapest Memorandum, but with some significant differences.

After the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in February 2014, these legal “guaranties” proved to be completely worthless. Zip, Nada, Niente.

The message to the world is LOUD and CLEAR: Whatever you do NEVER, EVER give up your nuclear weapons.

By doing nothing the signatory parties in an instant made a MOCKERY of the last 60 years effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology. And the treaty of nuclear Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) from 1970.

It also sent out another equally LOUD and CLEAR message to the world: To guarantee your survival GET NUCLEAR WEAPONS!

And this terrifying message gets even clearer when you consider North Korea and Iran. In the latter case these “negotiations” has been going on and off for nearly 20 years

The latest round (the so called Iran and the P5+1) started in February 2014 with a very strange setup pushed by the Obama administration. First you do a lot of unilateral concessions and then you start negotiations. USA gave back frozen money ($4.2 billion + $2.8 billion), eased sanctions ($7 billion + $1.5 billion), ignored the intercontinental Ballistic missile program, that every UN Security Council Resolution has been broken, every broken promise to IAEA, denial of inspections, the vastly expanded enrichment program, the big stockpile of enriched uranium etc. etc.

And to REALY top it off: The Chief US nuclear negotiator with Iran is Wendy Sherman. She is Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth-ranking official in the U.S. Department of State. The SAME WOMEN how was in charge of US negotiations with North Korea to stop them from getting nuclear weapons.

Yeap, we ALL KNOW how that went.

At the present moment the Obama administration have given the Iranians a lite over 80% of what they want without getting anything in return.

When the time comes when Iran “officially” goes nuclear it will have an instant and immediate effect – the rest of the Middle East will ALSO go OFFICIALY nuclear.

Doesn’t that sounds like a really lovely and peaceful world wouldn’t you say?

Little Green Men

Back to Ukraine and just a few tidbits of the last two days:

Yesterday (February 14) the day before the “ceasefire”, there was about 170 attacks on Ukrainian positions.

Just one example (and remember this is ALL happening in the “peaceful” Europe): In the late afternoon yesterday there was a full-scale engagement of tank and mechanized units of Ukrainian troops meeting the Russian armed forces on a stretch of Nyzhnje Lozove – the northern suburbs of Novohryhorivka. The battle did not bring a convincing victory to either side, but the Russians stopped trying to assault Lohvynove, leaving this settlement as “neutral” territory.

Today (February 15), so far, about 10 attacks around Debaltseve and Luhansk. But a lot of active regrouping and reinforcements is going on the Russian side.

A few examples: Russian troops transferred a fresh tactical group (up to 20 tanks, 10 ACVs, and 200 personnel) to the vicinity of Lohvynove.

The Russians continued transferring reinforcements to the Shyrokyne village area, trying to “isolate” the offensive by Ukrainian units along the stretch of Shyrokyne – Sakhanka. The transfer of an infantry formation from the vicinity of Bezimenne has been observed ­– over 100 people, 5 armored vehicles and up to 20 motor vehicles.

Another convoy (about 5 transport units) with wounded soldiers (about 200 people, the majority are Russian mercenaries and soldiers) has arrived to the settlement of Krasnyi Luch. The majority of mercenaries are the recruits of Russian intelligence services –Russian citizens who had no previous experience in the military.

Un update: The Russian’s is most active in shelling in the direction of Debaltseve. In particular, from 12:00 am to 3:00 pm EEST 42 fire strikes have been recorded in this area:

In addition, the Russian’s has carried out four attempts at an offensive during that time in the direction of Debaltseve, attacking the positions of Ukrainian troops near the settlement of Chornukhyne.

In addition, 2 fire strikes at civilian objects by ‘DNR’ insurgents and Russian mercenaries were recorded in Donetsk (8:25 am and 3:10 pm EEST – mortar attacks on city blocks). Also, ‘DNR’ mercenaries attacked civilian targets in Popasna at 12:15 am EEST from MLRS. In all three instances, the fire strikes took place in the areas where there are no [firing] positions of Ukrainian troops.

Yeap, the same old same old “ceasefire”. First the one on September 5 2014 and now the Minsk 2 from February 11.

Little Green Men

42 attacks in three hours just in the Debaltseve area. That’s international diplomacy and peacekeeping for you. Angela Merkel and François Hollande can be REALLY PROUD of their “ACIVMENT”.

This is just a very small sample of what has been going on day in and day out for the last 9 months. Here in Europe. The continent of “peace”.

And most of the western so called “leaders” again and again throughout history with disturbing and catastrophic regularity pretend that nothing is going on. Nothing to see, nothing to do, move on.

Because if you pretend hard enough that the really bad things that are happening here and now, is not happening; then you can pretend that everything is “OK”. And then you don’t need to do anything that “disturbs the peace” and the mind of your population with unpopular and hard decisions. At least long enough so someone else has to take care of the mess.

The problem with that of course, as history has proven so many times, is that the longer you wait to deal with a serious problem, the harder and costlier it is going to be to “solve it”. And if you wait long enough it becomes “unsolvable”.

Syria is an excellent case in point.

That is a formula that here in Europe has led to two world wars, the cold war, internal civil wars, total political oppression, censorship, massive and total surveillance of the population, concentration and GULAG camps, slave labor, organized and state supported mass killings, ethnic cleansing on massive scale, massive deportations, euthanasia programs, the master race, blood purity, the New Soviet man, enemies of the people etc.

And we “exported” these ideologies to the rest of the world.

All this in just the last hundred years.

Yeap, we have a lot of things in Europe to be “proud of”.

To make some more points about recent events I leave it to the “locals” east Europeans to explain. They have survived occupation and deportations by Nazi Germany and they have survived occupation and deportations by Soviet Union. So I think they learned a few things:

“In the 1930s, Hitler pursued a simple policy: he simply said one thing and did another. Putin has innovated: he not only lies but uses forces to do his bidding for which no one holds him responsible and thus has the chance to be accepted by some in the West as a “responsible” statesman while continuing his aggression in Ukraine.

Thus, the most important news from Minsk is not that there has been an agreement between the Kremlin leader, the German chancellor, the French president and the Ukrainian president on most of the aspects of a ceasefire but rather that the leaders of the undeclared “peoples republics” are refusing to go along.

Citing “an informed source,” TASS is reporting today that the leaders of the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics have refused to sign the document “agreed upon by ‘the Normandy quartet,’” thus in one sentence presenting Putin in a way the West will like and showing that what he has signed will have no impact on what he continues to do.
That is just one of the important conclusions about the Minsk meeting suggested by Andrey Piontkovsky who points out in a commentary today that “the very fact of its having taken place is much more important than the little pieces of paper which [these leaders] will sign or not sign”.

The Minsk meeting which follows on the Moscow meeting between Putin, on the one hand, and Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, on the other, reflects a significant change in the way the West is dealing with Putin over all issues and is showing up the Kremlin leader’s position at home, the thing he cares most about.

At the time of the Brisbane summit, Western leaders were demonstratively isolating someone who was invading Ukraine and otherwise violating the international rules of the game. According to Piontkovsky, that threatened Putin’s standing with precisely those on whom his survival depends.

“The power of the dictator depends on the unqualified subordination to him of two or three dozen people: senior civilian, police, media and military officials,” he writes. And these people are completely behind Putin as long as he could guarantee them wealth based on stealing from Russians at home, the ability to keep the results of their theft in the West, and “a sweet life there for several generations of their descendants.”

Russians firing at Debaltseve.

After Brisbane, it began to look as if he no longer could provide such guarantees, and they began to question their support. But Putin responded with a clever campaign in which he caused the leaders of Europe to change their approach and thus restore his unchallenged authority at home with precisely those on whom his dictatorship depends.

Putin’s response took the form of suggesting that Moscow was prepared to use nuclear weapons if the West armed Ukraine, a campaign that has its roots in the words of Dmitry Trenin, the former GRU officer who heads the Moscow Carnegie Center, first in 2009 and most recently in an interview to a British newspaper.

That sparked fear in Europe that Putin might in fact use nuclear weapons, split Europe from the United States with regard to Ukraine, and led both Merkel and Hollande to “walkd to Canossa” first in Moscow and now in Minsk, a dramatic shift that convinced those around Putin that the Europeans are so afraid of Russia that they won’t do anything to oppose its actions.

This nuclear “blackmail” has been “at many levels, taken many forms and been creative,” Piontkovsky says. It has made use of the North Koreans, Rogozin, Ivanov, Shoygu and others. And most recently, it has taken the form of a Russian TV spot showing Russian tanks “visiting” the capitals of Europe on Victory Day.

And Putin’s propaganda ploy has worked. The day after US President Barack Obama’s nominee to be defense secretary said the US would increase military assistance Ukraine, including possibly lethal arms, Chancellor Merkel announced that “Germany does not intend to sell arms to Ukraine since it considers that the conflict does not have a military solution and that diplomatic efforts must continue.”

She certainly had read Dmitry Trenin in the Financial Times and heard the warnings of German analyst Alexander Rahr, and she drew exactly the conclusion that Putin hoped for: The Americans are engaged in a reckless policy and Russia might respond with “tactical nuclear weapons,” something that would affect Europe but not the Americans “beyond the ocean.”

Consequently, she and Hollande rushed to Moscow and then to Minsk, allowing Putin to put on the show of being interested in peace even though his agents show that he is not and thus taking exactly the steps that shore up his dictatorship rather than weakening it and leading Moscow to change its dangerous course of aggression.”

“Vytautas Landsbergis, Lithuania’s first post-Soviet leader and honorary chairman of the conservative Homeland Union, says that the Minks agreement for ceasefire between Kiev’s forces and Moscow-supported separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine, which was signed on Thursday, is worse than the Munich agreement of 1938.

The conference in 1938 has come to symbolize Western impotence after Great Britain and France tried to appease Adolf Hitler by giving him Sudetenland, which led to occupation of Czechoslovakia and, eventually, World War Two.

”In that Munich conference, there probably weren’t any Sudeten SS men speaking in the name of the nation and demanding to carve up Czecholsovakia. At least they were not sitting at the table. And these [Ukraine’s separatist fighters] did,” Landsbergis said on Thursday, after presenting his new book in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania.

The politician noted that the Minsk talks on the future of Ukraine gave word not just to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President François Hollande, Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but also to self-appointed leaders of the separatist-held regions, Igor Plotnitsky and Alexander Zakharchenko.

Words of defeat

The Minsk agreement demands the withdrawal of heavy military equipment behind a 50-kilometre demilitarized zone. Kiev has pledged to implement a constitutional reform, delegate self-government powers to the separatist regions and resume payments.

”As you read through it [the agreement], you are aghast – why do they have to give up everything? Everything. Give territory, recognize these bandits as leaders who get invited to the table and allowed to sign documents. Why give this legitimization to Putin’s mercenaries?” Landsbergis wonders, adding that the same line was agreed on in ceasefire talks on 19 September 2014.

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, asked to comment on the constitutional reform outlined in the agreement, noted that it would involve decentralization, not federalization. Landsbergis thinks, however, that these are words of the defeated party.

The situation on February 15

”These are talks of the defeated. First, the mercenaries should not have been allowed to sit in the talks. If countries negotiate and Russia is dictating the kind of constitutional reform they should have, then one can ask – where is your own constitutional reform, when are you starting to respect your constitution, Mr. Putin? Otherwise, shut up and don’t tell us about the constitution. We are a democratic country with a popularly elected parliament. I am an elected president, Poroshenko could say. Whereas you appointed yourself,” Landsbergis says.

He adds he is disappointed with German Chancellor Merkel, who, he says, believed Putin’s ”puppet theatre”. This is how he sees Merkel’s statements that Putin had exerted pressure on the separatists to sign the agreement.

”She accepted the puppet theatre. What they did in the end was a puppet show. Perhaps everything followed stage instructions. Putin allegedly demands something of his groupies and they do not listen. He must put his fist down and they insist they will still be able to refuse. All sane people should realize this was but a silly show, but they take it seriously. Why sink to such a low level?” Landsbergis is indignant.

The Kremlin says boko haram

During Thursday’s event at the Foreign Ministry, where Landsbergis presented his new book on 13 January 1991 events to foreign ambassadors, he insisted that Western powers should arm Ukraine.

”I still believe that the Ukrainians could be armed against Russian tanks. Otherwise it means that Ukraine has been sold out. It’s worse than Munich. We should discuss Munich today,” Landsbergis told the audience.

The Lithuanian politician, who led Lithuania’s own liberation from the USSR efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has said that Russia is telling blatant lies, which are nonetheless accepted as something worth discussing. ”This way, everything becomes partly true, partly false, but in fact it is utterly false, because it is a purposefully designed lie aimed at influencing our judgement. It is war on thinking,” he said.

Landsbergis believes that there have been only a few moments when Russian leaders were told the truth. Once, US Secretary of State John Kerry told Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that he couldn’t listen any more of what the latter was saying.

”Only one person, as far as I know from the media, Secretary of State John Kerry told Lavrov: It’s impossible to listen to you, Mr. Lavrov. It was reported, though I wasn’t there and no one recorded it. But it was reported that Kerry couldn’t listen to what the Russians were saying. In normal parlance that means: Go to hell, liar,” according to Landsbergis.

”President Barack Obama, too, once said he had nothing to talk about with Putin. However, they [Russians] manage to force Western leaders into talking not just with them, but also with the bandits from Donetsk,” he added.

According to Landsbergis, Russia has declared war on the Western civilization.
”West is the enemy. The Kremlin said so. In Arabic, that translates to boko haram. That’s the Kremlin’s slogan, boko haram.”

Boko Haram is the name of a terrorist Islamist movement based in northeast Nigeria. The name in Arabic means ”Western education is forbidden”.

”However, Western leaders have their excuse: we do not want war. But war is on, lady. Yet she sees nothing wrong in Ukrainians being killed,” Landsbergis said. He insisted that Western Europeans were not unaffected by the conflict, reminding that the Russian-supported separatists downed a passenger plain over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people, mostly from the Netherlands.

”It did not crash, it was shot down, with all the people inside, it fell down 10 kilometres while people were still alive,” Landsbergis said.”

Russian tanks destroyed near Debaltseve

Putin’s Incredibly Shrinking Russian World – Why He Insisted on Minsk for Talks

Staunton, February 14 – Despite his success in intimidating some European governments into inaction or even willingness to come to terms with the results of his aggression, Vladimir Putin in fact is having to cope with an ever-shrinking Russia world as his insistence on Minsk as a venue for talks about Ukraine shows.

Indeed, had European leaders understood that the Kremlin leader could hardly tolerate talks anywhere else, they would have been in a far better position to make more demands not only of Putin concerning Ukraine but also of Alyaksandr Lukashenka, their official “host” in the Minsk talks.

In a comment for the Charter 97 web site, Iryna Khalip, a Belarusian journalist who writes regularly for Moscow’s Novaya Gazeta, says that Putin needed his meeting with the German chancellor and the French president to be in Minsk “and not in any other place in the world” for three reasons.

First of all, she says, Putin chose Belarus because it is one of the few places outside of Russia where he feels himself to be “the master.” That is not the case in Kazakhstan, and the Kremlin leader isn’t inclined to travel beyond the borders of his Eurasian Economic Community whose rulers defer to him most of the time.

Second, Belarus was about the only place where the Donbass separatists “could feel themselves safe” and where they would “not only not be arrested but would be able to sit at one table with the adults.” That gave them the status Putin wanted them to have, and just their being at the same talks was “sufficient” for his purposes.

And third, “by insisting on Minsk as the site of the meeting, Vladimir Putin reduced to nil all the declarations of the leaders of the EU countries made after the mass arrests” in Belarus in December 2010. At that time, they said that any high level contacts between the EU and Belarus were impossible.

Despite those declarations, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande came to Minsk, where they were hosted by the author of those arrests, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and said nothing about the freezing of former presidential candidate Mikola Statkevich or anyone else. He remains in prison. Had the Europeans insisted, Putin would have convinced Lukashenka to release him.

Russian tanks destroyed near Debaltseve

Khalip then addresses the larger problems of this venue as a summit. Summit meetings, she points out, are not occasions for negotiations but rather “the last stage” in such a process. But Merkel and Hollande acted otherwise and that gave Putin the opportunity to “wrap them around his little finger” and get what he wanted out of the session without yielding anything in return.

“The difference between Merkel and Hollande, on the one hand, and Putin and Lukashenka on the other is that the latter two not once for many years has kept his word,” Khalip writes. The Europeans are accustomed to the idea that promises will be kept, while Putin and Lukashenka assume that promises are made for anything but that.

And the Europeans, or at least Merkel and Hollande, suffer from another problem as well: they can’t afford to take part in a meeting after which they would have to say to their electors at home: “forgive us, we weren’t able” to reach an agreement. That means they need to know going into a meeting what will be agreed to or they will be manipulated.

This need also means that the Europeans do not always understand what the meeting is about or what the other side wants. Putin knew what he wanted at Minsk and it was not about the Donbass. He had much bigger goals in mind, including the end of sanctions, an end to his isolation, and a reaffirmation of his role in Belarus.

“Europe in these negotiations thus demonstrated all its weaknesses,” Khalip says, including its “complete inability to defend itself, its lack of a strategy toward the Russia of today, its indifference to the territories of others,” and its willingness to pay off bandits like Putin and Lukashenka in order to continue to live quietly until they make new threats and new demands.”

The village of Nikishyne

Germany and France ‘Sacrificed Ukraine’ for National Economic Interests, European Parliament Vice President Says

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, “without the participation of the EU and promoting the economic interests of their own countries, have sacrificed Ukraine,” Czarnecki says, legitimating Russia’s “achievements” and creating a world more beneficial to Moscow than to Kyiv.

In other comments, the Polish and European politician says that it is unfortunately the case that some European countries “would like to have peace at any price,” something they may have achieved in the short run by their concessions at Minsk but not something that is likely to last for long.

On the one hand, Czarnecki says, the pro-Moscow militants in southeastern Ukraine with continuing Russian backing are likely to try to seize even more territory and undermine Ukrainian statehood. And on the other, Kyiv will have no choice but to try to block them whatever the Minsk accords say.

By insisting on the negotiating arrangements in Minsk, Putin not only excluded the US, legitimated his agents in Ukraine, but has divided Europe still further, an amazing Russian achievement but one that the leaders of Germany and France in large measure facilitated, something that Ukrainians and all people of good will should never forget.”

Donetsk airport from drone

‘What Can Ukraine Expect from the West Now?’ Former GULAG Inmate Asks Bitterly

This is a statement from Myroslav Marynovich, founder of Amnesty International Ukraine, a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and President of the Ukrainian PEN Club. He was arrested on April 23 1977 and he was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour and five years in exile. The same year Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience. He spent a decade in the Soviet GULAG camps in Kazakhstan, and he has issued the statement below about how Ukrainians feel about what is happening to them now.

I write to you as a former prisoner of conscience of the Brezhnev era. All other titles are rapidly losing sense in the light of the bleeding Ukrainian Maidan.

All my life I admired Western civilization as the realm of values. Now I am close to rephrasing Byron’s words: “Frailty, thy name is Europe!” The strength of bitterness here is matched by the strength of our love for Europe.

If it still concerns anybody in decision-making circles, I may answer the question in the title.

First and foremost, stop “expressing deep concern”. All protestors on the Maidan have an allergy to this by now in these circumstances senseless phrase, while all gangsters in the Ukrainian governmental gang enjoy mocking the helplessness of the EU.

Take sanctions. Don’t waste time in searching for their Achilles’ heel: it is the money deposited in your banks. Execute your own laws and stop money laundering. The Europe we want to be part of can never degrade the absolute value of human lives in favor of an absolute importance of money.

Also cancel Western visas for all governmental gangsters and their families. It is a scandal that ordinary Ukrainians living their simple lives have to provide their ancestors’ family trees to obtain a visa while ruling criminals guilty of murder, “disappearances”, and fraud in the eyes of the whole world enjoy virtually free-entry status in Europe.

Do not listen to Yanukovych’s and Putin’s propagandistic sirens. Just put cotton in your ears. Be able to decode their lie; otherwise they will decode your ability to defend yourself.

Instead, listen to Ukrainian media sacrificing their journalists’ lives to get truthful information.

Do not rely so much upon the information provided by your special correspondents in other countries who come to Ukraine for a day or two. Hire Ukrainians who live in this country to translate the Ukrainian cry of pain. Secure money for that right now instead of waiting for funds from next year’s budget.

Come to Ukrainian hospitals and talk to so-called “extremists” who want to “subvert the legitimately elected government,” those who have “cruelly beaten” policemen and “deliberately” blasted explosives to wound themselves.

Yes, the face of war is cruel. But, arriving at the Maidan, these people repeated almost literally what King George VI said to his people on the 3 September 1939: “We have been forced into a conflict, for we are called… to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world.”

Go out of your zone of comfort! Just recall the coddled ancient Romans who refused to do that in time. Cajoling Putin won’t bring you security. Letting him take control over Ukraine could make the world peace even more vulnerable. A Ukraine divided by force won’t bring the world peace, just as a Poland and Germany divided by force didn’t bring peace to the world.

Let us conclude in solidarity with the King and the Ukrainian people: “The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead, and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield, but we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God. If one and all we keep resolutely faithful to it, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, then with God’s help, we shall prevail.”

Russians firing at Debaltseve.

And to sum up the Russian mood: Russian TV says how Russia will capture Europe by May 9

Russian propagandists dream about holding the May 9 parade in Europe.
A story of a Russian TV channel on February 10 was posted on the Internet. It tells that Russian troops can reach Warsaw within 24 hours and then “visit” Berlin, Prague, Vilnius, Tallinn, Riga and, finally, London.

So the German people/taxpayers who so far have paid most of the bailouts of the bankrupt euro states (Greece, Spain. Portugal, Ireland etc), and were the bankrupt states insists on Germany paying EVEN more to “save the euro” (together with Sweden, Finland etc), don’t even have HALF THE NET WEALTH of the peoples they are bailing out!

No wonder that the German Bundesbank is keeping this report secret. Because I don’t think the people in Germany is going to be “very happy” when they discover the truth.

They have keep their economy in reasonably good shape and paid their taxes. Now they have to pay for the ones who didn’t.

And there is a newGermany Anti-Euro Party with some very prominent figures behind it. Its founders are a collection of some of the country’s top economists and academics, business people, journalist etc.

And by then way, this would never ever happen in Sweden. Because here, these same people, are the ones that have relentlessly driven (together with our “dear” politicians), the integration with EU and moving most of the power to Brussels. What a contrast.

In December 2006, the ECB established the HFSC network of survey specialists, statisticians, and economists from its own ranks, national central banks of the Eurozone, and statistical institutes. The acronym stood for Household Finance and Consumption Survey. It would collect “micro-level structural information” on household wealth. A massive bureaucratic undertaking. Surveys went out in 2010. Results are now ready. No one in Europe had ever done a survey on that scale before. And no one might ever do it again. Because, in the era of bailouts and wealth-transfers, the results are so explosive that the Bundesbank is keeping its report secret—and word has leaked out why.

The surveys were conducted on a national basis, with each central bank publishing its own report. They would then be combined and summarized by the ECB into a cohesive picture of how wealthy—or how poor—people in various parts of the Eurozone were. A number of countries already published their reports, including Italy and Austria.

What the Austrian National Bank found was not pretty (20-page PDF). The considerable wealth in Austria was very unevenly distributed. The wealthiest 5% owned nearly half of the country’s wealth. Their median wealth was €1.7 million in diversified assets. The lower 50% owned only 4% of the country’s wealth. Of them, 83% rented their homes. Their median wealth was a measly €11,000 consisting usually of a car and a savings account. That’s half of the people!And 10% had a net wealth of less than €1,000.

This unequal distribution of wealth created a huge gap between median income (half the people earned more, the other half less) of €76,000 and average income of €265,000 (pushed up by a small number of extremely wealthy households). And that’s why some countries don’t even publish average income values. Too much truth would hurt.

Germany’s data is likely to be similar—but the Bundesbank is treating its report like a secret. Because the results are, let’s say, awkward for two reasons.The highly unequal distribution of wealth is one of them. The German government already went through wild gyrations late last year, and now again, over its Poverty Report that exposed some inconvenient facts that were then edited out—something that was leaked immediately, and it caused a ruckus [read…. Censored: Poverty Report in Germany].

Italy is the other issue. But it may be too hot for the Bundesbank to touch. Italy’s report (142-page PDF) finds that median household net wealth has increased 56% since 1991. And from 2008 to 2010, it increased by about 5% annually, despite the crisis!

But the wealth of German households stagnated during much of that time while they paid taxes out of their noses. And now they might learn that Italy’s median household wealth is €163,875—while Germany’s is closer to Austria’s, around €76,000. Less than half!

“Politically explosive,” sources at the Bundesbank whispered to the FAZ.

These reports show that in some countries, like Italy, where government finances have been in crisis, median household wealth is actually greater than in some financially healthy countries where governments have kept deficits and debts down.

Germany’s federal government only had a minuscule deficit in 2012. But high taxes and the citizens’ greater willingness to pay them—though cheating is a national sport—have over the years extracted a lot of wealth from the people and transferred it to the government. In Italy, people have been more adept at hanging on to their wealth. To the detriment of government finances. Other studies have shown similar trends, but never on such a scale with such detail, and in this “harmonized” and easily comparable manner.

It could stir up a firestorm in Germany. It’s not just jealousy. Strung-out German taxpayers would have to be bamboozled into bailing out the mountain of Italian government debt that the Italians, whose median wealth is twice that of Germans, refused to pay for. It won’t sit well. Not at all. It could become a political nightmare for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces an election in a few months and must keep any kind of tumult out of the scenery.

If the report ever sees the light of the day in unvarnished form—not a certainty given the debacle of the Poverty Report—Bundesbank statisticians will be trying to explain away the difference between countries like Italy and Germany. Household wealth is particularly high in countries with high homeownership rates, they will argue. In countries where renting is popular, like Germany, a considerable part of the housing stock is owned by the government and rented out in a subsidized manner. Thus the wealth is public, etc. etc. Because the bailout saga must go on. The messy reality that Germans can’t afford to bail out their richer neighbors must not be allowed to interfere with the grand and glorious saga of the euro.

Every country in the Eurozone has its own collection of big fat lies that politicians and eurocrats have served up in order to make the euro and the subsequent bailouts or austerity measures less unappetizing. Here are some from the German point of view….. Ten Big Fat Lies To Keep The Euro Dream Alive.”

“On September 17, the German Labor Ministry sent a draft report “on Poverty and Wealth” to the other ministries to be rubber-stamped. Only the final report, once sanctified by Chancellor Angela Merkel, would be made public. The draft was supposed to remain hidden. But it seeped to the surface almost immediately. And it was hot. Too hot.

The massive data (PDF, 535 pages) described the tough reality that many people faced in Germany—a reality that got tougher every year. For example, in 1998, the lower 50% of the population owned 4% of all private wealth, while the upper 10% owned 45%. By 2008, the lower 50% owned only 1%, but the upper 10% had increased its share to 53% (at the expense also of the in-between 40%). Other reports have painted similar pictures.

The poverty report by Germany’s statistical agency showed that the “poverty rate” in Germany has been creeping up: in 2008, it was 15.5%; in 2009 it was 15.6%, and in 2010 it was 15.8%. Particularly hard-hit were people under 65 who lived alone. Their poverty rate was 36.1%. For single-parent households, it was 37.1%. The city of Munich issued its own poverty report. By taking into account Munich’s high cost of living, it found that nearly a fifth of its residents lived in poverty.”

“A new party is forming this spring, intent on abandoning European efforts to prop up the common currency. And its founders are a collection of some of the country’s top economists and academics.”

Named Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), the group has a clear goal: ”the dissolution of the euro in favor of national currencies or smaller currency unions.” The party also demands an end to aid payments and the dismantling of the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund.

”Democracy is eroding,” reads a statement on its website (German only). ”The will of the people regarding (decisions relating to the euro) is never queried and is not represented in parliament. The government is depriving voters of a voice through disinformation, is pressuring constitutional organs, like parliament and the Constitutional Court, and is making far-reaching decisions in committees that have no democratic legitimacy.”

Prominent Supporters

Alternative for Germany appears to be different, though it has yet to produce a party manifesto. Its impressive list of prominent supporters includes a large number of conservative and economically liberal university professors. The most notable name on the list is Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former president of the Federation of German Industries, but it also includes such economists as Joachim Starbatty and Wilhelm Hankel, who were part of the group that challenged Greek bailout aid at Germany’s Constitutional Court.

Main initiator Bernd Lucke, a professor of macro-economics from Hamburg, was a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats for 33 years before leaving the party in 2011 as a result of euro bailout efforts. ”The current, so-called rescue policies are exclusively focused on short-term interests, primarily those of the banks,” Lucke told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week.”

EU, and the political elites behind it, is no longer a caricature or a joke. They have managed to become a joke of a caricature. An absurd Alice in Wonderland economic and political farce is playing out and the common people of Europe is, as usual, paying the price.

Here is just some updated data to some of my previous posts. It ain’t pretty to say the least!

The EU Crisis is anything but over regardless of what the political elites are trying to tell people in Europe. The ECB may have pushed the banking crisis temporarily back by promising unlimited bond buying. Yes, dear people, read that again – UNLIMITED!

That’s your tax money spent like a drunken sailor.

But soon there is NO MONEY LEFT.

So here we go again for the 7th, 8th or is it the 9th time so far – Europe’s banking system is breaking down again. No surprise to anybody expect or politicians and bankers.

Just start adding up the GIGANTIC NUMBERS and be utterly horrified!

This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in.

They are literally ruining us all. And WE, the common people, have to pay the price of their folly and speculations.

“How can broke economies lend money to other broke economies who haven’t got any moneybecause they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent to the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent them in the first place because the broke economy cant pay it back”.

Even a 5 year old can understand this. But not “our” politicians and bankers.

Remember that the Euro was always a political project. That’s why “they” haven’t done the”proper” economic policies. Because these policies would undermine the political purpose of the Euro. So they, the political elites of EU, are trapped. And that’s why the Euro was domed from the beginning.

And of course, none of this is covered in the mainstream/old media or by our “dear” politicians.

“Greece’s four largest banks need to boost their capital by 27.5 billion euros ($36.3 billion) after taking losses from the country’s debt swap earlier this year, the largest sovereign restructuring in history.

To put this in perspective: The entire capital base of the Greek banking system is only €22 billion.

By saying that Greek banks need €27.5 billionGreece is essentially admitting that is needs to recapitalize its entire banking system. Also, you should know that Greek banks are still sitting on €46.8 billion in bad loans.

So the Greek banks have a capital base of €22 billion and bad loans of €46.8 billion.

There is a name for this – Bankrupt!

And remember, this is AFTER ALL the “rescue plans”, bailouts etc. already implemented so far by the “Troika” (IMF, ECB and EC).

Cyprus

Cyprus is the euro area’s third-smallest economy in GDP terms, accounting for less than 0.2% of the region’s output. Yet the country urgently needs external funding and applied for an Troika (EC/IMF/ECB) programme last summer. In the meantime, the amount in question has risen to EUR 17.5bn (100% of GDP).

Read that again – 100% of GDP!

By mid-2012, larger banks like Bank of Cyprus or Cyprus Popular Bank alone reported loans to Greek borrowers that exceeded Cyprus’ GDP.

The Cyprus central bank’s emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) to the banking system skyrocketed from EUR150m in March 2012 to EUR 9.9bn (55% of GDP) in September.

So the Cyprus central bank only in September but in 55% of the whole Cyprus GDP into its own banking sector.

“Bankia’s shareholders have received a nasty new year’s surprise. They may lose most of their investments or even all of them says the Spanish bank rescue fund in its latest report.

According to FROB, the Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring, Bankia has a negative value of 4.2 billion euros, and its parent group BFA is 10.4 bn in the red.

Valuation is key in the recapitalisation of Spain’s banking system, weighed down by massive bad loans accumulated in a property bubble that burst in 2008. Bankia/BFA is set to receive 18 bn euros of European aid, and become the country’s biggest bailout recipient.”

A little known fact about the Spanish crisis is that when the Spanish Government merges troubled banks, it typically swaps out depositors’ savings for shares in the new bank.

So when the newly formed bank goes bust, your savings are GONE. Not gone as in some Spanish version of the FDIC will eventually get you your money, but gone as in gone forever.

This is why Bankia’s collapse is so significant: in one move, former depositors at seven banks just lost virtually everything.

In addition, things are going from worse to worst, as bad loans in Spain continue to accelerate to massive new record highs.

Index of Spanish Industrial Output

Italy

In Jan 2012, Italy’s government believed Italy’s 2012 GDP would come in at – 0.4%. The actual in (Q3) – 2,4% (so far). Only a miss by 600%.

And the forecast for Italy’s GDP in 2013 is being lowered every month. Each one as inaccurate as the previous one.

The all too familiar story how the political elite, in their own words and documents, decided to deceive and actively lie to the British people in an all out effort to join the “common market”.

Here is a piece by Christopher Booker and Richard North (see below) on the deceit and active lying behind Britain’s entry to the EU in their, the politicians, own words.

“The real problem the British people have had with the ‘European project’, as its insiders call it, is that they have never really begun to understand its real nature, and what was always intended to be its ultimate goal.

The chief reason for this is that our politicians have never properly explained it to us.

What makes this so much worse is that those who were most enthused by it, such as Heath, knew full well what ‘the project’ was really about — the plan to weld all Europe together under an unprecedented form of super-government.

They deliberately decided to conceal it from us, for fear that our anxieties about our loss of sovereignty might prevent them from being allowed to join.”

“Thus, stealthily assembled over decades, would this new ‘country called Europe’ finally take its place on the world stage. What we found most shocking in researching this story was that, when Britain’s leaders first considered joining the project, they were made fully aware of this hidden agenda.

As we see from Cabinet papers and other documents of the early Sixties, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and his ‘Europe Minister’ Edward Heath were put completely in the picture about the secret ‘grand plan’. But in June 1961 the Cabinet formally agreed that it must not be revealed to the British people.

In Macmillan’s words, to admit ‘the political objectives’ of the Rome Treaty would raise ‘problems of public relations’ so ‘considerable’ that they should be kept under wraps. It was vital to emphasise only the economic advantages of British entry.”

“On the day we entered, he told the British people on television that any fears that ‘we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty’ were ‘completely unjustified’.

This was a deliberate lie, as no one knew better than him and the senior Foreign Office official who two years earlier had written a secret paper on ‘Sovereignty’.

The paper chillingly spelled out how it would be the end of the century before the British people woke up to how much of their power to govern themselves and make their own laws had been given away — by which time it would be too late.”

We seen this sad story repeated in country after country. The same behaviour with few exceptions.

This relentless drive at ALL COSTS from the political elites, on purpose, for a political union and European super state regardless of the will of the people.

And if the people protest and object, as they have EVERY time they where ALLOWED to, it doesn’t matter! Run them over, force it through one way or the other as the examples from the last 40 years clearly shows.

“At first it should be presented as just a trading arrangement, the ‘Common Market’ set up in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome. But the essence of that treaty was to create the core institutions of what Monnet always intended should one day be the ‘Government of Europe’.

The idea was to work for ‘ever closer union’.

Treaty by treaty, it would take over more powers from national governments, based on the sacred principle that once power to make laws was handed over to Brussels it could never be given back.”

“The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.”

I disagree with one thing this author says: “EU is the Stupid Empire”. EU is a POLITICAL project. The Euro is part of that political project.

A lot of EU’s decisions make no economic sense whatsoever. In that regard, Peter Hitchens observation that “EU is the Stupid Empire” is completely right. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.

The economic side was always a way to “sell it to the people”. Step by step. So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it.

BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project.

Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions.

One small example, before the referendum on the Euro in September 2003 in Sweden, ALL parties (with the exception of some communists, greens, socialists and some from the agrarian party, ALL big unions, ALL mainstream media, ALL the representatives of the business world etc was for the Euro. And they put massive financial and personal resources behind this.

But the Swedish people, wisely, rejected this with 56% to 42%.

In the latest opinion poll, December 2011, 87,6% of the Swedish people were against the Euro. 9,7 % for. (Update- one year later these figures are even worse).

They planned this, and wanted this. And they kept on purpose this real ideology behind the EU project well hidden from their citizens in their countries.

They kept everything on purpose, including treaties, SO technical and juridical that it was totally unreadable for the common people. Like the EU “constitution”.

Just to give one example of how meaningless the local parliaments have become:

In Sweden 65 to 85%, depending of which area, of “decisions” made by the Swedish parliament HAVE ALREADY BEEN DECIDED IN BRUSSELS.

I.E. The national Swedish parliament is in reality rubber-stamping Brussels decisions and implementing them.

That’s all!

And they cannot change even one syllable in these decisions. So much for “representing” the will of the people.

But of course, they are not telling us that. They pretend that ALL these decisions are made locally by the Swedish parliament as the “sovereign” representatives for the Swedish nation. When in reality they can, to the most part, only decide the colour of their on toilets.”

And sadly, and as usual, the mainstream media/old media has for the most part taken en active role in promoting this political union and the European Super State. Add to that, the press utter failure to inform the people of their respective countries how EU REALLY works. And what it means to people and the sovereignty of their countries.

Most journalists have no clue about the important “inner” bureaucratic gameand ”the machinery” where nearly everything is decided. Instead, we see these useless reports and photo ops when the prime ministers or finance ministers meet. When in reality 99,8 or 9 % is already decided before they meet. Most of it is just a “show”. Often “very dramatic” late in to the night.

And this is nothing new. We have seen so many different examples of this betrayal of journalist in their role as journalist. This is just sadly another.

Forty years ago today, in what was arguably the most fateful political move ever made by a British Prime Minister, Edward Heath took us into what was then called the ‘Common Market’.

Such a step had scarcely been mentioned at the previous General Election, and the British people had very little idea of what they were letting themselves in for, other than a trading arrangement that might make it easier for us to sell our goods to our Continental neighbours.

Four decades later, the picture could scarcely look more different. We have seen that supposedly cosy club we joined transformed, step by step, into a vast, bloated bureaucratic empire, imposing its suffocating rule over 27 nations.

We have also seen it plunged into the most destructive crisis in its history — one it has brought entirely on itself by its reckless dream of locking the countries of Europe together into the straitjacket of the euro.

During those 40 years the British have never been happy members of this club. Too often we have been out of step, and even bitterly at odds, with the rest — as in our refusal to join that single currency.

But today, as the EU’s inner core of countries drive towards ‘full political union’ in a desperate bid to save their doomed euro, the British now look at this swollen political monster with fearful bemusement.

Politicians of every party talk plaintively about the need for us to negotiate a ‘looser relationship’ with the EU, while opinion polls consistently show a growing majority wanting to leave it altogether — an option that even David Cameron no longer rules out.

Even on the Continent, influential voices are now recognising that something very significant is happening in Britain, as they suggest we should perhaps be allowed something never seen before — a mere ‘associate membership’ of the EU, allowing us to continue trading with it but without all its political superstructure.

How did we come to such a pass? Are we today looking at another historic crossroads, in its own way just as fateful as the one we faced back in 1973?

The real problem the British people have had with the ‘European project’, as its insiders call it, is that they have never really begun to understand its real nature, and what was always intended to be its ultimate goal.

The chief reason for this is that our politicians have never properly explained it to us.

What makes this so much worse is that those who were most enthused by it, such as Heath, knew full well what ‘the project’ was really about — the plan to weld all Europe together under an unprecedented form of super-government.

They deliberately decided to conceal it from us, for fear that our anxieties about our loss of sovereignty might prevent them from being allowed to join.

Ten years ago, with my co-author Richard North, I wrote a comprehensively researched history of the ‘European project’.

I had already been reporting for years on the incredible damage membership of the EU was doing to British life, through thousands of crazy directives and regulations, through the destruction of our proud fishing industry and the undermining of our agriculture, which was until 1973 the most efficient in Europe.

The real story, surprisingly, goes back to the 1920s, when a senior League of Nations official, Frenchman Jean Monnet, first began to dream of building a ‘United States of Europe’, very much on the lines that decades later would shape the European Union as it is today.

After World War II, Monnet, by then the second most powerful man in France, finally set the project on its way. He knew there was no chance of bringing such an astonishingly ambitious vision into being all at once. So his plan was that it should gradually be constructed, piece by stealthy piece, without ever declaring too openly what was intended to be its ultimate goal.

At first it should be presented as just a trading arrangement, the ‘Common Market’ set up in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome. But the essence of that treaty was to create the core institutions of what Monnet always intended should one day be the ‘Government of Europe’.

The idea was to work for ‘ever closer union’.

Treaty by treaty, it would take over more powers from national governments, based on the sacred principle that once power to make laws was handed over to Brussels it could never be given back.

Ever more countries would be brought into the net, until the project reached its ultimate goal as a super-government, with its own president and parliament, its own currency and armed forces, its own flag and anthem — all the attributes of a fully-fledged nation state.

Thus, stealthily assembled over decades, would this new ‘country called Europe’ finally take its place on the world stage. What we found most shocking in researching this story was that, when Britain’s leaders first considered joining the project, they were made fully aware of this hidden agenda.

As we see from Cabinet papers and other documents of the early Sixties, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and his ‘Europe Minister’ Edward Heath were put completely in the picture about the secret ‘grand plan’. But in June 1961 the Cabinet formally agreed that it must not be revealed to the British people.

In Macmillan’s words, to admit ‘the political objectives’ of the Rome Treaty would raise ‘problems of public relations’ so ‘considerable’ that they should be kept under wraps. It was vital to emphasise only the economic advantages of British entry.

Thus did Macmillan and Heath become drawn into complicity with that same web of deceit which was driving the ‘project’ itself (which is why we called our book The Great Deception).

Twice in the Sixties Britain made failed attempts to join the project — but within weeks of Heath entering Downing Street in 1970, he applied to Brussels a third time. Scarcely had negotiations begunthan he learned that his future partners were already discussing the next steps along their path to full integration: a single currency, European defence forces, a common foreign policy.

Heath immediately sent word to Brussels pleading for all this to be kept quiet, because it might blow the gaffe with British voters.

For two years the negotiations continued, with Heath handing over all he was asked for, from giving away Britain’s fishing waters, the richest in the world, to become ‘a common European resource’,to the betrayal of our Commonwealth partners by excluding their goods from what had been for many their main export market.

Finally, Heath got what he was after: entry to the club — although he still pretended that the Common Market was little more than a trading arrangement.

On the day we entered, he told the British people on television that any fears that ‘we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty’ were ‘completely unjustified’.

This was a deliberate lie, as no one knew better than him and the senior Foreign Office official who two years earlier had written a secret paper on ‘Sovereignty’.

The paper chillingly spelled out how it would be the end of the century before the British people woke up to how much of their power to govern themselves and make their own laws had been given away — by which time it would be too late.

So began the dismal story which has been unfolding ever since. Already by the late Seventies, as the Common Market morphed into ‘the European Community’, we were becoming known in Brussels as ‘the awkward partner’.

Then came Mrs Thatcher’s five-year battle to win that rebate on our payments into the EU budget which, thanks to the ludicrously lop-sided conditions accepted by Heath, would have made us the largest single contributor by 1985.

In 1986 came the treaty called the Single European Act, which not only set up the Single Market but handed over to Brussels all sorts of other powers, including environmental laws which were to lead to everything from the shambles of our rubbish collections to building thousands of hated and useless wind turbines.

EBC Balance sheet

In 1990, nothing did more to inspire hostility to Mrs Thatcher among her European colleagues, led by Jacques Delors, than her defiant opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, designed to create the European Union, introduce the ‘social chapter’ and, above all, to launch the single currency.

As soon as he replaced her, John Major proclaimed his wish for Britain to be ‘at the heart of Europe’ and signed the Maastricht Treaty (admittedly with those vital opt-outs for Britain on the single currency and the social chapter).

But seven years later he ended up more at odds with his partners than ever, as they imposed their worldwide ban on the export of all British beef products over ‘mad cow disease’, tried to sneak us into the social chapter under ‘health and safety’ rules and laid their plans for yet another integrationist treaty in Amsterdam.

Tony Blair, too, wanted to be ‘at the heart of Europe’, as the single currency approached (which he would love to have joined), signing us up to the social chapter with its damaging working-time rules, and two more treaties, at Amsterdam and Nice.

But he too found it hard to keep up with that relentless drive for ever closer union, as it led to seven years of tortuous negotiation to create ‘A Constitution for Europe’,eventually sabotaged by the voters of France and Holland, so that it had to be smuggled in by deceit as the Lisbon Treaty (which, among much else, incorporated the Court of Human Rights into the EU). Scarcely was the ink dry on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s signature on that treaty than the EU was plunged into its worst-ever crisis over the euro, which today is spreading misery across southern Europe.

As always, the response of the EU’s leaders has been to call for yet ‘more Europe’, and a new treaty to force the eurozone members into ‘full political union’.

This is now leaving Britain more obviously marginalised than ever, condemned to remain in the outer ring of a club, many members of which would now be only too pleased to see the back of us.

This humiliating prospect has seen our politicians running around like bewildered sheep, bleating about the need for Britain to negotiate a ‘looser relationship’ with the EU, to get back to that trading arrangement we thought we were entering 40 years ago.

Astonishingly, this is now even being echoed as a possibility by those influential voices in Europe itself — even though the most fundamental rule of the club we joined back then was that, once powers are passed to Brussels, they can never be given back.

As David Cameron prepares to give that ‘very important speech on Europe’ he has promised us very soon, he could not do better than to meditate on the shrewdest words ever uttered by a Prime Minister about Britain and Europe. In 1973, as a junior member of Heath’s Cabinet, Margaret Thatcher made all the approved noises about how wonderful it was for Britain to join this club.

Once in office, however, she went on a painful learning curve, as she saw from the inside just what the real game was and how ruthlessly it was played. She was brought down in 1990 by an alliance of Europhiles in her party and their Brussels allies, because she was the last real obstacle to their Maastricht Treaty.

What really riled them was that she had seen through their true agenda and the disastrous course on which they were set.

With even Jacques Delors, the chief architect of Maastricht, suggesting it might be best for Britain to leave the EU, Mr Cameron should dwell on a passage from her last book, Statecraft.

‘That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on,’ wrote Lady Thatcher, ‘will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain...should ever have become part of it will appear a political error of the first magnitude.’

If Mr Cameron truly wishes to speak for the British people and our country’s future, he should bear those prophetic thoughts in mind.”

“The piece serves to remind us that entry was perpetrated on the basis of structured deceit, with successive prime ministers (Macmillan and Heath) actively lying as to their broad intentions and the proposed relationship with the Six. “

“Those utter fools who assert that the relationship was primarily economic (and has since gone off the rails) need to read the Cabinet Memorandum of 21 June 962, (originally referenced C. (61) 84 and now CAB/129/105), in which Macmillan set out the purpose of seeking full United Kingdom membership of the European Economic Community, as ”… the only effective way of securing our political objectives in the world, and of averting the dangers of continued division in Europe”.

Then, in a note to his Cabinet colleagues on 10 October 1961 (Originally C.(61)162, now: CAB/129/107 – see above), Edward Heath asserted that the UK had been following closely the progress towards unity in fields other than those covered by the three communities.

He conveyed to his colleagues that it was the intention of the UK to work with the Six ”in a positive spirit to reinforce the unity already achieved”. Heath was ”convinced” that the UK and the Six ”share the same essential interests”, and that ”the habit of working together, once formed, will mean, not a slowing down, but a continued advance and the development of closer unity”.

From the very start, therefore, it was evident that Heath intended to take the UK into the EEC with a view to developing further political unity. The economic issues were always camouflage, and the label ”Common Market” was simply a ploy deliberately to obscure the real intent.

Cameron and modern-day politicians are now paying the price for that deceit, having to deal with a relationship founded on a bed of lies and poisoned by the continuing deception.

Such a situation is irrecoverable, which means there can only be one resolution – our withdrawal from the European Union. Simply, a relationship built on lies can never prosper, and can never be repaired. We need to start again to avoid what Thatcher called a ”the greatest folly of the modern era”.

And the first step starts with the admission that the EU and its precursors were never economic alliances. The economic aspects were always a means to an end, designed to secure political unity,something which has been foisted upon us by deceit, and of which we want no part. “

Or this is why the Euro is doomed. And after that EU – Yes we have NO Money.

On Saturday November 17, police officers from all over Spain marched through Madrid, protesting austerity measures and cuts. They even apologized to the public for arresting the wrong people. One of the slogans was:

”Citizens! Forgive us for not arresting those truly responsible for this crisis: bankers and politicians.”

The whole economic and political crisis in EU and USA summarized in one simple sentence.

“The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.”

I disagree with one thing this author says: “EU is the Stupid Empire”. EU is a POLITICAL project. The Euro is part of that political project.

A lot of EU’s decisions make no economic sense whatsoever. In that regard, Peter Hitchens observation that “EU is the Stupid Empire” is completely right. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.

The economic side was always a way to “sell it to the people”. Step by step. So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it.

BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project.

Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions.”

The EU bureaucrats and the political elites always fall back, when they have nothing else to say in defence of the EU, that this is a “peace project”. Well this “peace project” has now created social havoc, riots, and put country against country, and groups of countries against group of countries.

Tearing apart the EU at it’s seems. And ALL of this because they, the political elites, literally AT ALL COST want to preserve the POLITICAL project euro. Which is the cornerstone of the federal super state of Europe.

As I have said before, this has nothing to do with economics; it’s ALL about politics,

And that is why so many people still don’t understand what is going on. Because from an economical point these policies are total madness. Ruining and lowering the living standard of most people. And the political elites know this. But the political project is MORE important.

Then there is Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, France….

Just start adding up the GIGANTIC NUMBERS and be utterly horrified!

This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in.

They are literally ruining us all. And WE have to pay the price of their folly and speculations.

This is from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO) Notice the rising trend of the 27 Developing Asian economies as a share of World GDP. Bloomberg’s Chart of the Day notes that by the end of 2012, Developing Asia will account for 17.9% of World GDP, surpassing for the first time Europe’s 17-nation 16.9% share. The euro-area crisis has merely accelerated a trend that has been ongoing for several years – as former IMF board member Domenico Lombardi notes, makes it clear that euro-area economies need to address their structural reforms rapidly.

America is on the same path, as while China will top Europe by 2017 as a share of global GDP, USA will be passed in five years when Developing Asia will have topped the USA for the first time ever.

All graphs gets bigger if you click on it

Just one small example of all these stupid US policies, on Januari 1, 2013, dividend tax rates are set to rise from 15% to as high as 43.4%. This affects not only US taxpayers, but everyone on the planet who invests in the US stock market.

As a result of this tax policy, many investors who own shares in US companies will now see their after-tax dividends slashed by 33%.

This is putting a lot of downward pressure on stock prices, affecting almost everyone who currently owns US shares– pension funds and retirement accounts, rich and middle class, US and non-US citizens alike. It’s as if the US government is hanging a sign over the country saying ”PLEASE DO NOT INVEST HERE.”

One more small example, in this case the UK, national government borrowing is already 22% higher than at this same point last year, a record year for borrowing. Meanwhile, the UK‘s budget deficit for August hit a record high.

I hope you get the picture- it isn’t pretty!

And the unemployment picture

And let’s continue with Spain:

Spanish bad loans

The figures are just out for the total Spanish bad loans during September: the loans that fell into arrears, (the part of a debt that is overdue after missing one or more required payments), increased by €3.5 billion from August, reaching €182.2 billion in September.This is 10.71% of the total Spanish bank loans of €1.7 trillion, and an increase from the previous month.

Putting the bad loan number in perspective, it is nearly double the €100 billion that the Spanish banks will receive as part of the bank bailout plan disclosed in July, and well above the ”only” €40 billion that Spain promises it will need to actually fund bank capital shortfalls.

If you compared as a percentage of GDP, it would be the equivalent of $2.8 trillion in US loans going bad.

Let’s look merely on one data series: the brand new Debt/GDP, (ignoring the -4.5% 2013 GDP forecast, already – 0.5% worse than the just released IMF forecast for Greece for the same period, remember also that the May forecast of 2013 predicted ”growth”), and compared it to the Debt/GDP ”forecast” from May 2010, when the first Greek bailout was announced.

It ain’t pretty

The Greece Finance Ministry

This is the same Finance Ministry where the EU inspectors found this in their taxation archive section (see the video 5:20-5-48):

Watch this documentary from ZDF (in german). It shows where 2 ½ years of bailout funds went, or rather didn’t go. And why 2 ½ years to the day after the first bailout, not only is Greece not fixed, but is getting worse ata cost to taxpayers of nearly half a trillion Euro.

The troika (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank), which are supposed to get Greece’s financial future in order cannot make even the most basic forecasting. And the Troika have made these “forecasts” repeatedly, which are a complete and utter joke. But there is NO surprise here,this is ALL about politics. The same way that EU allowed Greece into the Euro knowing that every figure was false. But for political reasons they were allowed to enter.

And these “guys” are supposed to save Europe? Where all the important decisions are being taken on the ground of these “forecasts”?

The Greeceunemployment

Again, It ain’t pretty.

I could go on, but I think I stop here.

You get the picture.

And of course, none of this is covered in the mainstream media or by our “dear” politicians.

This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in.

They are literally ruining us all. And WE have to pay the price of their folly and speculations.

And after the Spanish bailout Ireland promptly requested a renegotiation of its own terms to match those of Spain.

And in six days there is the Greece election. Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece’s leftwing Syriza coalition of course used this bailout to strengthening his party’s position.

“What we wonder is why did Europe cave to the Spanish demands before the Greek elections. Because, paradoxically, by yielding to a bailout plan, which at least superficially has been painted as one without conditions, it just cemented Syriza’s entire electoral platform as having absolute validity.

Then again, on the insolvent continent, nothing really surprises us any more.”

And of course, none of this is covered in the mainstream media or by our “dear” politicians.

“The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.”

I disagree with one thing this author says: “EU is the Stupid Empire”. EU is a POLITICAL project. The Euro is part of that political project.

A lot of EU’s decisions make no economic sense whatsoever. In that regard, Peter Hitchens observation that “EU is the Stupid Empire” is completely right. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.

The economic side was always a way to “sell it to the people”. Step by step. So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it.

BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project.

Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions.

One small example, before the referendum on the Euro in September 2003 in Sweden, ALL parties (with the exception of some communists, greens, socialists and some from the agrarian party, ALL big unions, ALL mainstream media, ALL the representatives of the business world etc was for the Euro. And they put massive financial and personal resources behind this.

But the Swedish people, wisely, rejected this with 56% to 42%.

In the latest opinion poll, December 2011, 87,6% of the Swedish people were against the Euro. 9,7 % for.

They planned this, and wanted this. And they kept on purpose this real ideology behind the EU project well hidden from their citizens in their countries.

They kept everything on purpose, including treaties, SO technical and juridical that it was totally unreadable for the common people. Like the EU “constitution”.

Just to give one example of how meaningless the local parliaments have become:

In Sweden 65 to 85%, depending of which area, of “decisions” made by the Swedish parliament HAVE ALREADY BEEN DECIDED IN BRUSSELS.

I.E. The national Swedish parliament is in reality rubber-stamping Brussels decisions and implementing them.

That’s all!

And they cannot change even one syllable in these decisions. So much for “representing” the will of the people.

But of course, they are not telling us that. They pretend that ALL these decisions are made locally by the Swedish parliament as the “sovereign” representatives for the Swedish nation. When in reality they can, to the most part, only decide the colour of their on toilets.

”The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.

Those of us who pay attention to history, politics and truth have known this for many years.

But as the EU’s ‘experts’ and ‘technocrats’ insanely destroy the economies ofGreece,SpainandItaly, it must now surely be obvious to everyone.

The EU, far from being a bright future, offers nothing but bankruptcy and decline.

If the old USSRwas an Evil Empire – and it was – the EU is the Stupid Empire. Obsessed with the idea that the nation state is obsolete, the EU has sought to bind its colonies tightly, while pretending they are still independent.

This is why what is essentially a modern German empire is not held together by armies, but by a sticky web of regulations and a currency that destroys prosperity wherever it is introduced (with one important exception, Germany itself, for whom the euro means cheap exports to Asia).

It is also why it has been built backwards, starting with the roof and ending with the foundations. Old-fashioned empires were at least honest.

They marched in, plundered everything they could cart away, killed or imprisoned resisters, suborned collaborators, and imposed their language on the conquered.

Other humiliating measures followed – forcing the newly-subject people to live according to the invader’s time, to pay special taxes to their new masters, to surrender control of their borders, to use the invader’s weights and measures, salute the invader’s flag and obey the invader’s laws.

Eventually, after a few years of imposed occupation money, set at a viciously rigged exchange rate, the subjugated nation’s economy would have been reduced to such a devastated and dependent state that it could be forced to accept the imperial currency.

The EU, which cannot admit to being what it really is, has to achieve the same means sideways or backwards. The colonial laws are disguised as local Acts of Parliament. The flag is slowly introduced, the borders stealthily erased, the weights and measures and the clocks gradually brought into conformity.

Opponents are politically marginalised, collaborators discreetly rewarded, armed forces quietly dismantled or placed under supranational command. It is happening before our eyes and yet, while the exit is still just open, we make no move to depart.

The atrocities continuous, ceasefire or no ceasefire, UN peace plan or no UN peace plan, it doesn’t matter.

A young boy shot through the eye by a sniper from Assad’s forces. A very brave solder indeed.

”A LITTLE BOY IS SHOT THROUGH THE EYE AND KILLED BY ASSAD’S FORCES. Homs(Jouret Al Sheyah): May 1, 2012- Kutaiba Amer Saber was shot by an Assadist sniper straight through his eye. what kind of human can take aim at a child and murder them in such a brutal way … all in the name of their leader, Bashar Al Assad.”

“THIS IS THE RESPECT ASSAD AND HIS FORCES HAVE FOR RELIGION. THEY DESTROY A MOSQUE MINARET. Homs(Al Sa’an): May 29, 2012- The Muslim world is outraged by cartoons, yet when Assad destroys mosque after mosque and forces detained men, women and children to renounce God … there is nothing but silence.”

”DAILY LIFE FOR A FAMILY – HUDDLED IN FEAR IN A BASEMENT. Idleb (Jisr Al Shighour): May 1, 2012- This is how these children live. This is how they are being raised, in cramped basements acrossSyria. When the cameraman asks the kids “Do you like Bashar?” They respond “No!” He asks why and they respond simply “because he’s hitting us with rockets”

The deliberate destruction and looting of Syria’s culture heritage. Remember that this happened in Iraq to but that was AFTER the fall of Saddam. In Syria, it happens with Assad’s consent and on his watch:

“In one of the most egregious examples, shells thudded into the walls of the 12th century al-Madeeq Citadel, raising flames and columns of smoke as regime forces battled with rebels in March. The bombardment punched holes in the walls, according to online footage of the fighting.

Local activists said regime forces carried out the assault and afterward moved tanks into the hilltop castle. Later footage showed bulldozers knocking through part of the walls to create an entrance.

The government and opposition have traded blame for damage and looting of sites around the country. But a group of European and Syrian archaeologists tracking the threats through witness reports from the ground says that in several cases, government forces have directly hit historic sites and either participated in or turned a blind eye to looting.

”We have facts showing that the government is acting directly against the country’s historical heritage,” said Rodrigo Martin, a Spanish archaeologist who has led past research missions inside Syria.”

And there is a new report from Human Rights Watch witch documents war crimes by Assad’s forces in Idlib “War Crimes in Northern Idlib during Peace Plan Negotiations”:

(New York) – Syrian government forces killed at least 95 civilians and burned or destroyed hundreds of houses during a two-week offensive in northern Idlib governorate shortly before the ceasefire, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The attacks happened in late March and early April, as United Nations special envoy Kofi Annan was negotiating with the Syrian government to end the fighting.

The 38-page report, “‘They Burned My Heart’: War Crimes in Northern Idlib during Peace Plan Negotiations,” documents dozens of extrajudicial executions, killings of civilians, and destruction of civilian property that qualify as war crimes, as well as arbitrary detention and torture. The report is based on a field investigation conducted by Human Rights Watch in the towns of Taftanaz, Saraqeb, Sarmeen, Kelly, and Hazano in Idlib governorate in late April.

“While diplomats argued over details of Annan’s peace plan, Syrian tanks and helicopters attacked one town in Idlib after another,” said Anna Neistat, associate director for program and emergencies at Human Rights Watch. “Everywhere we went, we saw burnt and destroyed houses, shops, and cars, and heard from people whose relatives were killed. It was as if the Syrian government forces used every minute before the ceasefire to cause harm.”

Human Rights Watch documented large-scale military operations that government forces conducted between March 22 and April 6, 2012, in opposition strongholds in Idlib governorate, causing the death of at least 95 civilians. In each attack, government security forces used numerous tanks and helicopters, and then moved into the towns and stayed from one to three days before proceeding to the next town. Graffiti left by the soldiers in all of the affected towns indicate that the military operation was led by the 76th Armored Brigade.

In nine separate incidents documented by Human Rights Watch, government forces executed 35 civilians in their custody. The majority of executions took place during the attack on Taftanaz, a town of about 15,000 inhabitants northeast of Idlib city on April 3 and 4.

A survivor of the security forces’ execution of 19 members of the Ghazal family in Taftanaz described to Human Rights Watch finding the bodies of his relatives:

“We first found five bodies in a little shop next to the house. They were almost completely burnt. We could only identify them by a few pieces of clothes that were left. Then we entered the house and in one of the rooms found nine bodies on the floor, next to the wall. There was a lot of blood on the floor. On the wall, there was a row of bullet marks. The nine men had bullet wounds in their backs, and some in their heads. Their hands were not tied, but still folded behind.”

Human Rights Watch researchers were able to observe the bullet marks on the wall that formed a row about 50-60 cm above the floor. Two of those executed were under 18 years old.

In several other cases documented by Human Rights Watch, government forces opened fire and killed or injured civilians trying to flee the attacks. The circumstances of these cases indicate that government forces failed to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to take necessary precautionary measures to protect civilians. Government forces did not provide any warning to the civilian population about the attacks. For example, 76-year-old Ali Ma’assos and his 66-year-old wife, Badrah, were killed by machine-gun fire shortly after the army launched its attack on Taftanaz in the morning on April 3 as they tried to flee the town in a pick-up truck with more than 15 friends and family members.

Upon entering the towns, government forces and shabeeha (pro-government militias) also burned and destroyed a large number of houses, stores, cars, tractors, and other property. Local activists have recorded the partial or complete burning and destruction of hundreds of houses and stores. In Sarmeen, for example, local activists have recorded the burning of 437 rooms and 16 stores, and the complete destruction of 22 houses. In Taftanaz, activists said that about 500 houses were partially or completely burned and that 150 houses had been partially or completely destroyed by tank fire or other explosions. Human Rights Watch examined many of the burned or destroyed houses in the affected towns.

In most cases, the burning and destruction appeared to be deliberate. The majority of houses that were burned had no external damage, excluding the possibility that shelling ignited the fire. In addition, many of the ruined houses were completely destroyed, in contrast to those which appeared to have been hit by tank shells, where the damage was only partial.

During the military operations, the security forces also arbitrarily detained dozens of people, holding them without any legal basis. About two-thirds of the detainees remain in detention to date, despite promises by President Bashar al-Assad’s government to release political detainees. In most cases, the fate and whereabouts of the detainees remains unknown, raising fears that they had been subjected to enforced disappearances.Those who have been released,many of them elderly or disabled, told Human Rights Watch that during their detention in various branches of the mukhabarat (intelligence agencies) in Idlib city they had been subjected to torture and ill-treatment.

Opposition fighters were present in all of the towns prior to the attacks and in some cases tried to prevent the army from entering the towns. In most cases, according to local residents, opposition fighters withdrew quickly when they realized that they were significantly outnumbered and had no means to resist tanks and artillery. In other towns, opposition fighters left without putting up any resistance; residents said this was in order to avoid endangering the civilian population.

The fighting in Idlib appeared to reach the level of an armed conflict under international law, given the intensity of the fighting and the level of organization on both sides, including the armed opposition, who ordered and conducted retreats. This would mean that international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict) would apply in addition to human rights law. Serious violations of international humanitarian law are classified as war crimes.

Human Rights Watch has previously documented and condemned serious abuses by opposition fighters in Syria, including abuses in Taftanaz. These abuses should be investigated and those responsible brought to justice. These abuses by no means justify, however, the violations committed by the government forces, including summary executions of villagers and the large-scale destruction of villages.

Human Rights Watch called on the United Nations Security Council to ensure that the UN supervisory mission deployed to Syria includes a properly staffed and equipped human rights section that is able safely and independently to interview victims of human rights abuses such as those documented in this report, while protecting them from retaliation. Human Rights Watch also called on the UN Security Council to ensure accountability for these crimes by referring the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court, and for the ongoing UN Commission of Inquiry to support this.

“The United Nations – through the Commission of Inquiry and the Security Council – should make sure that the crimes committed by Syrian security forces do not go unpunished,” said Neistat. “The peace plan efforts will be seriously undermined if abuses continue behind the observers’ backs.”

“The soldiers had handcuffed him behind his back. They didn’t hit him in front of me, but I saw that his eye was bruised. I tried to be quiet and nice to the soldiers so that they would release him.

They spent about 15 minutes in the house, asking him about weapons and searching everywhere. I think they were looking for money. I didn’t say good-bye so as to not make him sad. He didn’t say anything either. When they left, the soldiers said that I should forget him.”

–Mother of Mohammad Saleh Shamrukh, chant-leader from Saraqeb, who was summarily executed by the Syrian security forces on March 25, 2012

“The soldiers placed the four of us facing a wall. They first asked Awad where his armed sons were. When Awad said that he was an old man and that he didn’t have any armed sons, they just shot him three times from a Kalashnikov. They then said to Ahmed that apparently 25 years in prison had not been enough for him. When he didn’t say anything, they shot him. They then shot Iyad without any questions and he fell on my shoulder. I realized that it was my turn. I said there is no God but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet and then I don’t remember anything else.”

–Mohammed Aiman Ezz, 43-year-old man shot three times in the back of the head and neck by government forces in an attempted execution of four men in Taftanaz on April 4. He was the only survivor

“I knew in my heart it was my boys [my son and my brother], that they were killed. I ran out, and about 50 meters from the house there were nine bodies, next to the wall. There were still snipers on the roofs, and we had to move very slowly, using flashlights. I pointed my flashlight at the first body, then the second – it wasn’t Uday or Saed. Then I asked the neighbors to help, and we found them both. Saed still had his hands tied behind. People later told me that Uday and Saed were executed there, and the other seven were FSA fighters brought from other places. Uday had a bullet wound in the neck and the back of his head; Saed in his chest and neck.”

–“Heba” (not her real name), mother of 15-year-old Uday Mohammed al-Omar and 21-year-old Saeed Mustafa Barish, both executed by the Syrian security forces in Saraqeb on March 26, 2012

“The tank was on the main road, just 10 meters away from the house. Suddenly, they fired four shells, one after the other, into the house. I was in the house next door, with my mother and six children. We were all thrown into the air by the blast, and for 15 minutes I couldn’t see or hear anything. Then we went into the room that was hit by the shells. One of the walls had a huge hole, some 1.5 meters in diameter, and the opposite wall was completely destroyed. We found Ezzat in the rubble; we could only see his fingers and part of his shoe. It is a miracle that his wife and child were not hurt. They were in the same house, but went to the kitchen when the shells hit. We took Ezzat out, but couldn’t save him. His chest was crushed, and blood was coming out of his mouth and ears.”

–“Rashida” (not her real name), a relative of 50-year-old Ezzat Ali Sheikh Dib who died when the army shelled his house in Saraqeb onMarch 27, 2012

“They put a Kalashnikov [assault rifle] to my head and threatened to kill us all if my husband did not come home. The children started crying. Then an officer told a soldier to get petrol and told the children that he would burn them like he would burn their father because he is a terrorist. When the soldier came back with some sort of liquid – it didn’t seem to be petrol – they poured it out in three of the rooms while we were staying in the living room. We wanted to get out of the house, but the soldiers prevented us. My young daughters were crying and begging them to let us go. We were all terrified. Finally, they allowed us to leave the house, but I became even more afraid when I saw all the soldiers and tanks in the street.”

–“Salma” (not her real name), whose house in Taftanaz was burnt by the soldiers on April 4, along with the houses of her five brothers-in-law

“They put me in the car, handcuffed, and kept there all day, until seven in the evening. I told them, ‘I am an old man, let me go to the bathroom,’ but they just beat me on the face. Then they brought me to State Security in Idlib, and put me in a 30-square-meter cell with about 100 other detainees. I had to sleep squatting on the floor. There was just one toilet for all of us. They took me to an interrogation four times, each time asking why some of my family members joined the FSA. I didn’t deny it, but said there was nothing I could do to control what my relatives do. They slapped me on the face a lot.”

– “Abu Ghassan” (not his real name), 73-year-old man who was detained in one of the towns in northern Idlib and held in detention for 18 days

“Syrian security forces have kept heavy weapons in cities in breach of a UN brokered cessation of hostilities, but the government and opposition both have committed truce violations, a top UN official said Tuesday.

The 34 unarmed military observers now in Syriahave seen Howitzer guns, armored personnel carriers and other weaponry in cities, UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told a press conference at UN headquarters.

Ladsous insisted, however, that the monitors were having an effect in cities where they have been allowed to go.

Withdrawing weapons and troops from Syrian cities was a key part of a six-point peace plan agreed by President Bashar al-Assad and UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan. Syria has told the UN that weapons have been pulled back.

”Regarding the heavy weapons, yes, our military observers do see a number of APCs, for instance, they see a number of Howitzers and other military equipment in most places where they are,” Ladsous said.

Syria has told the monitors that the armored carriers have been disarmed but this has not been verified, Ladsous added.

The UN Security Council has approved a 300 strong force to monitor the cessation of hostilities which started on April 12 but has barely held. Ladsous said only 150 monitors have been promised by UN member states so far. Syria has refused visas for three monitors that the UN wanted in the country.

Ladsous, a UN under secretary general, said that government forces and opposition groups have broken the truce.

”All the parties need to take further steps to ensure a cessation of violence in all its forms.”

”The important fact is that violations do come from both sides,” he said while refusing to say whether one side had committed more breaches.

Annan is to brief the Security Council on May 8 on events in Syria, where the UN says well over 9,000 people have died since an uprising against Assad started in March last year.”

The new Berlin Wall, but of course, it’s ONLY to “protect” the people inside the wall. And were are the international protests?:

Syria’s sealed-off rebels

Baba Amr in Homs, once an opposition stronghold, is now isolated by a 10-foot high concrete wall

BABA AMR, Syria— For Syrians on both sides of the concrete wall that now surrounds this neighborhood, the comparisons to the region’s longest running conflict are unavoidable.

“When my wife described the wall to me I immediately thought of the wall built by the Israelis to isolate Palestinian villages and towns in theWest Bank,” said Abu Annas, formerly a resident of Homs’ devastated Baba Amr district.

“I can understand that Israel built a wall to protect Israeli settlers from Palestinians. But I cannot understand how a national government builds a wall to separate its citizens from each other.”

Since forcing the retreat of rebel fighters from Baba Amr after a brutal month-long bombardment in February, government forces have constructed a massive concrete wall to seal off the former opposition stronghold.

A reporter for GlobalPost recently visited Baba Amr and the wall, describing it as up to 10-feet high and made of cement. It’s still so new there is no graffiti. Since most residents have long fled, the neighborhood behind the wall has become “a dead land for cats and dogs,” as one former resident described it.

Soldiers and secret police guard the few narrow passages through the wall, arresting any male aged between 13 and 60, said Annas, whose wife and young daughter recently went to check on what remained of their home inside Baba Amr.

“They spent half an hour arguing with the security officer who said his men would have to check them before they passed through,” he said. “She came back crying, saying, ‘There is no Baba Amr.’”

Those houses not destroyed in February’s siege have been taken over by soldiers, Annas said. Electricity and phone lines have been cut for months and now cars cannot enter, nor delivery trucks, meaning shops are almost all closed.

Activists in the area said the neighborhood — once home to some 28,000 people — has now been all but abandoned, with only about 1,000 still living inside the wall.

In other Sunni-majority opposition neighborhoods throughout Homs, such as Karm al-Zeitoune, where whole families were killed in recent sectarian massacres, and Deir Balbah and Qarabes, the majority of residents have also fled.

With the UN-Arab League ceasefire plan in tatters — at least 462 people have been killed since April 16 when the UN resolved to send ceasefire monitors, according to the opposition Local Coordination Committees — and veto-wielding Russia blaming the armed opposition for the majority of attacks, the Assad regime appears to be taking steps to re-exert long-term security control and collectively punish rebellious communities.

On Saturday, Abu Bakr Saleh, a spokesman for the Baba Amr media center who lived through the bombardment, said other security measures were preventing residents from traveling between Baba Amr and neighboring Joubar neighborhood, to the far southwest of the city.

Last week, GlobalPost witnessed continued shelling in Khaldiyeh and Bayada, Sunni-majority neighborhoods in north Homs that support the opposition and lie adjacent to Zahara, a neighborhood of mainly Allawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, to which the ruling Assad family and a majority of government elites belong.

Cairo Street, which leads from north Homsinto Zahara in the east of the city, has been renamed “Death Street” by locals after the deadly snipers deployed to rooftops, presumably to protect the pro-regime neighborhood.

On their first visit to Homs on April 21, members of the advance team of UN observers, the first of 300 due to be deployed to monitor violations of the ceasefire agreement, were forced to take cover after shots rang out as they walked down Cairo Street from Bayada.

“The regime will not adhere to the Annan plan and the near future will prove that,” said Omar, a 24-year-old member of the rebel Free Syrian Army, told GlobalPost in an interview at his home inHoms’ Deir Balba.

“The regime is preparing for the post-Annan cease-fire by building walls around Sunni districts to block our movement and is digging a long trench around Homs two meters wide.”

Reports of Assad’s forces digging trenches around the south and west of Homs, where Baba Amr is located, first emerged last November. A video journalist working with GlobalPost witnessed the trench during a visit to Homs this February. The purpose of the trench remains unclear, but it appears to be a another military tactic to hinder access to rebellious neighborhoods.

In Daraa, the first city to rise up against the regime and suffer a sustained military assault, GlobalPost recently witnessed a labyrinth of checkpoints and deployment of tanks, troops and snipers, effectively sealing off the population from surrounding areas and the capital.

The regime blames “armed terrorist groups” for the breakdown in the ceasefire agreement. Information Minister Adnan Mahmoud told state-run Syrian Arab News Agency last week that the “terrorists” had committed more than 1,300 violations.

Russia last week echoed a similar line. Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich accused the opposition of shifting “to tactics of terror on a regional scale,” claiming Western governments were arming the rebel fighters.

Rather, it appears post-revolutionary Libya, which strongly supports Syria’s opposition, has made the first serious effort to arm the rebels. On Saturday Lebanese authorities announced they had discovered guns and rocket propelled grenades aboard a ship attempting to dock in north Lebanon’s Tripoli, a Sunni-majority city also widely supportive of Syria’s opposition.

Omar, the young rebel fighter from Homs, said the FSA was now restructuring after suffering a strategic defeat in Baba Amr.

“We will adopt guerilla tactics,” he said. “We are fighting in small groups and moving from one district to another so we don’t let the regime block this district and kill us. The FSA leaders made a big mistake when they tried to hold Baba Amr.”

As the rebels seek new strategies for their armed struggle, the Assad regime has made its contempt of the international diplomatic effort clear. Assad himself revealed his scorn for last December’s Arab League monitoring mission in an email, first obtained and verified by the Guardian.

Writing to Hadeel Ali, his young media consultant, the president forwarded a YouTube video ridiculing the mission’s inability to spot hidden Syrian tanks, to which she responded, “Hahahahahahaha, OMG!!!”

That same contempt appeared to be on display more recently as Kofi Annan, the Arab League envoy, briefed the Security Council on a letter received from Syrian Foreign Minister Waleed Mualem on April 21. The letter stated that the government had now withdrawn all heavy armor and troops from population centers, the first step in Annan’s cease-fire plan.

But daily videos of smoke billowing above Homs and troops opening fire in urban protest centers have told a very different story.

Syrian officials see Annan’s plan as “a license for the regime to do more of the same,” the respected International Crisis Group, one of the only international think tanks able to still interview Syrian officials, wrote in its April 10 report.

“As the regime sees it, Annan’s mission, far from presenting a threat, can be a way to drag the process on and shift the focus from regime change to regime concessions,” ICG reported, “granting humanitarian access, agreeing to a ceasefire and beginning a vaguely defined political dialogue, all of which can be endlessly negotiated and renegotiated.”

As that process unfolds, the wall in Baba Amr stands as a physical symbol of the deep-seeded sectarian hatred that a year of relentless violence in Syria has engendered in former neighbors.

“The Sunni districts are hosting terrorists and armed gangs so the government should close them off by all means. If this needs a high wall, why not?” Haidar, a 35-year-old Allawite fromHoms’ Zahara neighborhood, told GlobalPost.

A member of the Popular Committees, the official name for armed civilian militias fighting for the regime, Haidar said the possible collapse of the regime would mean no future for three million Allawites in Syria’s big cities. “We would return to our villages in the mountains,” he said.

“We have been occupying senior positions in the army, security agencies and government in Syria for four decades and we will keep the power in our hands, whatever this costs us.”

Yazen is a four-year-old boy from Homs who found refuge in the Lebanese town of Ras Baalbek three months ago. He lost his ability to speak because of the psychological trauma he endured after being brutally beaten by the Syrian regime’s thugs when they came into his home in search of his father.

The killing machine in Syria did not spare children; rather, since the start of the uprising, the regime of Bashar al-Assad has intentionally targeted them, earning the Syrian president the title of “child murderer” among his detractors.

According to the Center for Documentation of Violations in Syria, 1,089 children – boys and girls alike – have been killed so far, and 464 wounded.

At the start of the uprising, a group of Syrians launched an initiative on Facebook calling for keeping children out of protests to keep them protected from the pro-regime forces that attack demonstrations. But it was not enough, as the killers go after children in their homes and schools. Reports by the United Nations and Human Rights Watch indicate that schools have been turned into detention and torture centers run by regime forces, who would also position snipers on the roofs.

According to the same reports, children have been shot by snipers, killed by shelling, tortured to death, and have died from untreated wounds. Reports also mention children being raped in prisons.

Anna Neistat, an associate director at Human Rights Watch, worked for years on conflicts from Chechnya to Zimbabwe to Sri Lanka. In an article in the Global Post, she said that the level of state-sanctioned torture taking place in Syria is incomparable with any other conflict she has ever witnessed. There is no distinction between children and adults in prisons, she said, adding that if anything, children are more brutally beaten, as investigators believe they respond faster to such practices.

In the same context, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay told the BBC that hundreds of children were taken as hostages or information sources. The Human Rights Watch report said that regular troops used children as human shields and put them in tanks and buses when the Syrian army stormed Ain Larouz in theprovince of Edleb on March 10.

The Syrian regime uses methodical violence against children for many reasons, including revenge, as children have played an essential role in the uprising from the beginning; indeed, it was children who wrote anti-regime slogans on walls in Daraa, launching the protests last year.

The regime is also trying to send other children a message. A year ago this week, the regime brutally tortured Hamza al-Khatib before sending his mutilated body to his parents, thus delivering a message to its opponents right from the start, namely that it is not bound by any moral and humanitarian deterrent and is capable of committing atrocities if the revolution goes on.

By targeting children, the regime is “striking the foundations” of the new generation and undermining the stability, safety and future of society and family, especially in rural areas where children are regarded as an “investment” by parents and a means to provide for them when they grow old, according to the UC Davis Human Rights Initiative Blog.

These practices have tremendous and dangerous effects on children who survive or witness such violence. “[The child] suffers from deep disorders and experiences a state of concern and feeling of being unsafe. This renders him or her unable to plan for the future, ignites his or her anger and influences his or her behavior,” says Psychoanalyst Rena Sarkis. “Any change in the child’s habits, such as having a different school or home, can put him or her in a state of shock. Seeing pictures of an earthquake in some countries affects the child’s spirit, as he or she fears that something similar may happen to him or her. This holds especially true when war invades his or her street, home and school. It is as though he or she was left alone in this life without any reference and markers,” Sarkis added.

Children victims of violence need to rebuild their sense of security and dignity by talking over what happened to help them understand and move on, Sarkis said, though UNICEF Child Protection Officer Abir Abi Khalil noted that while some children can express themselves using words, others find it difficult to do so.

In an attempt to provide them with psychological support, UNICEF established “child-friendly spaces” in the Lebanese regions in which Syrian nationals took refuge. Volunteers organize entertainment, cultural and educational activities for children and use drawing to help them express what they cannot put into words. “Drawings speak,” says Abi Khalil, adding that in their first drawings, many children depicted weapons, fire and guns. “Several months now into their displacement and participation in activities, they have started drawing suns and children.”

According to UNICEF Media Director Souha Bsat, the idea underlying the project is to allow the child to lead a normal life away from home, since parents – due to their mental state – cannot provide an atmosphere of joy and calm. These activities also help Syrian children mingle with their Lebanese peers, who also need spaces for playing and entertainment, since the Lebanese regions that saw an influx of Syrian refugees are the poorest inLebanon. Bsat goes on saying that these spaces fill the free time of displaced children constructively, especially for those who have been unable to enroll in Lebanese schools or were forced to work in order to provide for their families.

In Syria too, despite the killing, groups have started providing psychological support to children. “We are rebelling for them so that we provide them with a more beautiful future. The calendar of freedom gives a detailed description every Tuesday of activities and games that help children deal with psychological trauma resulting from violence,” according to the Facebook page of Syrian journal Ayyam al-Horriya (Days of Freedom).

But as Sarkis points out, it is only after the violence ends can Yazen and other children recover the glitter, color and songs of their childhood. “

And thanks to NATO’s, EU’s and US overthrow of Qaddafi weapons are flowing all over the place. Defected Syrian officers and agents desperately pleading with the Obama administration to change policy but to no avail. And this lunacy policy is CREATING EXACTLY THE SITUATION which this no arms policy is said to prevent:

“In the seven months since the Qaddafi regime was destroyed, Washington, London and Paris have turned a blind eye to the impossibility of establishing a stable government in Tripoli because rebel factions and militias identified with al Qaeda which control Libya’s main towns are too busy running the biggest arms smuggling network ever seen in North Africa.

Rockets, explosives and every kind of weapon is reaching al Qaeda elements and affiliates in abundant quantities across northern Africa and the Middle East, including their offshoots in Egyptian Sinai and the Gaza Strip.

Groups identified with al Qaeda have seized control of large parts ofMaliand directly threaten the stability of the Algerian government.

Sources report fears that Syriamight go the same way as Libya. Syrian officers and agents who have deserted from Syrian military and security agencies have made their way to Washington to implore administration officials to abandon the US policy of non-intervention in Syria. They warn that the rebel Free Syrian Army is falling into the clutches of al Qaeda.It won’t be long, they say, before these jihdist terrorists not only wreak mayhem in Syria, but turn that country into their haven and base for cross-border attacks against Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Jordan.

Their pleas have not moved the Obama administration. That so long as the Americans stay out of involvement in Syria, France, Turkey and Arab League nations will also stand aside, because the US alone is capable of establishing combined commands and infrastructure for coordinating an operation with multiple air support on the scale required for Syria.

By opting out of action in Syria, the West and the Arab League not only give Assad free rein to continue slaughtering his people but leave the door open for al Qaeda to move in on the various Syrian rebel movements and add the element of terror to the ongoing carnage.”

“He is a liar, a liar,” he said. ”It was just talk, talk, talk. Nobody helped us.”

Inside Syria’s broken city of Homs

The eccentricity of terror is drawn in dust-covered colours in the homes of Baba Amr.

“Few people were prepared to talk, but one man was upset enough on learning he was talking to a Briton to damn the perfidy of David Cameron, who had seemed to want to help but had ”done nothing”.

”He is a liar, a liar,” he said. ”It was just talk, talk, talk. Nobody helped us. The whole world was against us.”

Another man described how he had been held in prison for 50 days – though not long enough to avoid the savagery of February’s bombardment that finally drove the Free Syrian Army’s Farouq Battalion from the suburb. It was a humiliating retreat which may have marked the turning point of this war.

”Every day for thirty days the shells came. They started at six in the morning and ended at eight at night. In between, there was not a minute’s peace.”

And this video makes fun of the Syrian state TV’s propaganda:

“THE LUNACY OF SYRIAN STATE TV – SAME MAN APPEARS IN 10 DIFFERENT VIDEOS FOR STATE TV AS ‘COMMON BYSTANDER OR WITNESS’. The video speaks for itself.”

Remember the suicide bombing against the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon on April 18, 1983 that killed over 60 people, mostly embassy staff members and United States Marines. An additional 120 people were wounded in the bombing

Of the Americans killed, eight worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, including the CIA’s top Middle East analyst and Near East director, Robert C. Ames, Station Chief Kenneth Haas and most of the Beirut staff of the CIA.

Following the attack, the embassy was moved to a supposedly more secure location in East Beirut. However, on September 20, 1984, another car bomb exploded at this embassy annex, killing twenty Lebanese and two American soldiers.

And then there was the Beirut Barracks Bombing on October 23, 1983 in Beirut, when two truck bombs struck separate buildings housing United States and French military forces—members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon—killing 299 American and French servicemen.

Of the 299 killed 241 was Americans. And sixty Americans were injured. Representing the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima of World War II, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the first day of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II.

The blasts led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force fromLebanon.

Well, that was “daddy” Hafez al-Assad and Iran (Hezbollah).

As I have been saying, It’s a family affair. A deadly one.

And here they are (from 1994):

At the front are Hafez al-Assad and his wife, Mrs Anisa Makhlouf. In the back row, from left to right, are Maher (1967 -), Bashar (1965 -), Bassel (1962 – 1994), Majid (1967 – 2009), and Bushra Assad (1960 -).

Under the Bush administration US policy towards Syria cooled in 2003. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell was the last high ranking person to go to Damascus in May 2003.

And the Bush administration recalled its ambassador to Damascus on February 15, 2005 after Syria’s assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Al-Hariri on 14 February 2005. Under the rest of Bush’s term no US ambassador where stationed in Damascus.

Following Hariri’s death, there were several other bombings and assassinations against anti-Syrian figures. These included Samir Kassir, George Hawi, Gebran Tueni, Pierre Amine Gemayel, and Walid Eido. Assassination attempts were also made on Elias Murr, May Chidiac, and Samir Shehade who was investigating Hariri’s death.

It was the “son” this time. Together with Iran (Hezbollah).

The assassination gave rise to the so-called Cedar Revolution, a rare Lebanese political consensus. Syria, cowed by the collective anger, had to withdraw its troops.

The primary goals of the original activists were the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and the replacement of a government heavily influenced by Syrian interests with more independent leadership, the establishment of an international commission to investigate the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri, the resignation of security officials to ensure the success of the plan, and the organization of free parliamentary elections.

The UN investigation and the Mehlis report

“The Mehlis Report is the result of the United Nations’ investigation into the 14 February 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri. The investigation was launched in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1595 and headed by the German judge, Detlev Mehlis. It involved questioning of Lebanese and Syrian officials.

The official Mehlis Report made no specific mention of anyone in the Syrian government as responsible for the assassination. However, the report was first erroneously released as a Microsoft Word document which preserved changes that had been made in the document since its creation. According to that document, the original U.N. report had specifically named many high-ranking Syrian government and military officials by name as being personally responsible for the death of Rafik Hariri.

For example, a previous editing of the report stated that ”Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamil al-Sayyed” were behind the killing of Hariri. But in the official version, this is replaced by ”senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. Maher al-Assad is the brother of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and Assef Shawqat, a powerful figure within the regime, is married to their sister Bushra. Suleyman is a top Syrian security official and al-Sayyed, the only Lebanese of the four, was formerly the head of Lebanon’s General Security Department.

Some suggest that the document indicates the report was altered to remove these names during a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, despite the fact that he had personally stated that this would not happen. Mehlis himself has denied outside influence on the report, and said that Annan did not suggest any changes. The motivation for removing the names is not known.”

“Ms. Pelosi was criticized by President Bush for visiting Damascusat a time when the administration — rightly or wrongly — has frozen high-level contacts withSyria. Mr. Bush said that thanks to the speaker’s freelancing Mr. Assad was getting mixed messages from theUnited States.

Never mind that that statement is ludicrous: As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish. “

“DAMASCUS– House Speaker NancyPelosi challenged the White House on Middle East policy yesterday, meeting with Syria’s leader and insisting ”the road to Damascus is a road to peace.”

That brought a sharp attack from the Bush administration, which has rejected direct talks with Damascusuntil it changes its ways.

”Unfortunately that road is lined with the victims of Hamas and Hezbollah, the victims of terrorists who cross from Syria into Iraq,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for President Bush’s National Security Council. ”It’s unfortunate that she took this unilateral trip which we only see as counterproductive.”

The United States accuses Syria of backing Hamas and Hezbollah, two groups it deems terrorist organizations. It also says Syria is fueling Iraq‘s violence by allowing Sunni insurgents to operate from its territory and is destabilizing Lebanon‘s government. Syrian security officials have been implicated in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri in Beirut, thoughDamascus has denied a role.”

”In one fell swoop, the Speaker legitimized and emboldened a ruthless thug whose unyielding support for terrorism has bogged down our attempts to bring stability and peace to the region at every step of the way. The excursion, condemned by most major newspapers, undoubtedly won Pelosi plaudits from her reflexively anti-Bush liberal base.

But most instructively, it revealed why Democrats remain woefully unfit to set the nation’s foreign policy.

Presenting Assad with “a new Democratic alternative” — code for making President Bush look feckless — Mrs. Pelosi usurped the executive branch’s time-honored foreign-policy authority.Her message to Assad was that congressional Democrats will forbid the president from increasing pressure on Damascus to stop its murderous way. Several leading legal authorities have made the case that her recent diplomatic overtures ran afoul of the Logan Act, which makes it a felony for any American “without authority of the United States” to communicate with a foreign government to influence that government’s behavior on any disputes with the United States. Regardless of the law, Pelosi proceeded to make Assad an important regional player without first having to become a responsible one. At such a critical moment in the volatile Middle East, this is no time for the United States to be sending out mixed signals to our enemies.”

Then enter the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton. With a total change of policy. They sent a new ambassador to Damascus. And were the Bush administration refused to lend the UN “Human Rights” Council credibility by U.S. membership and withholding taxpayer dollars.

In 2009 President Obama, signed on, paid the dues, and is currently seeking a second three-year term for the United States on the Council. Etc(see my part 9).

Why??

Because the Obama administration had determined that Assad was a “reformer”

Yeap, you read right. According to Obama, Clinton and the top democrats, Assad was a “reformer” who they could work with.

And they did and tried. And kept silent about the atrocities. As long as he was “their man”.

As late as March 28 2011 Clinton STILL called Assad a “reformer”. That was two weeks after the uprising stared in earnest.

Back in March Hillary Clinton said (in CBS “Face the Nation) their would be no intervention in Syria because the dictator Bashar Assad was a “reformer.”

“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday drew a contrast between Syrian President Bashir Assad and his late father and predecessor, and said U.S. lawmakers who recently have visited Damascus regarded him as a “reformer.”

She made the startling comment while explaining why the United States will not intervene on behalf of Syrian civilians revolting against the regime as it has done in the case of Libya.”

“Doing the round of Sunday television talk shows with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Clinton told CBS’s Face the Nation that the U.S. would not enter the conflict in Syria as it has in Libya.

“No,” she said. “Each of these situations is unique.”

While saying the administration deplored the violence in Syria, she contrasted the situation to that of Libya.

“What’s been happening there [in Syria] the last few weeks is deeply concerning, but there’s a difference between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities and then police actions, which, frankly, have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see.”

“CBS newsman Bob Schieffer, the interviewer, noted that the president’s father, Hafez Assad, had “killed 25,000 people at a lick” – a reference to the crushing of an Islamist revolt in the town of Hama in 1982 – and said the regime now was firing at civilians with live ammunition.

“Why is that different from Libya?” he asked.

“There’s a different leader in Syria now,” Clinton said. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

Despite appeals from the Obama administration, Bashir Assad has aligned himself with Iran and Hamas.”

“A regular visitor to Damascus is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who has met with Assad at least six times, most recently last November.

Kerry was a strong supporter of the Obama administration’s decision to re-engage the Assad regime and to send an ambassador to Damascus for the first time in five years. He has also taken an interest in prodding Syria and Israel towards peace talks.

In a March 16 speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on U.S. policy in the light of what he called “the new Arab awakening,” Kerry referred to the situation in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Morocco, Oman and Lebanon.

There was not a single reference in the speech to Syria, however.

When Kerry was asked about Syria during a question-and-answer session afterwards, he voiced optimism about the direction relations were taking.

“I have been a believer for some period of time that we could make progress in that relationship,” he said. “And I’m going to continue to work for it and push it.”

“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Kerry continued. “And when I last went to – the last several trips to Syria – I asked President Assad to do certain things to build the relationship with the United States and sort of show the good faith that would help us to move the process forward.”

He mentioned some of the requests, including the purchase of land for the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, the opening of an American cultural center, non-interference in Lebanon’s election and the improvement of ties with Iraq and Bahrain, and said Assad had met each one.

“So my judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it.”

Kerry said nothing about the need for internal reform in Syria.

In contrast, Kerry early this month was an outspoken advocate for the administration to act in Libya, describing Gaddafi as “a mad man bent on maintaining power” and saying the U.S. should lead the world in preventing the slaughter of more Libyan civilians.”

“Assad, like his father, has nurtured strong ties with Iran and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, while continuing to host Palestinian terrorist groups in Damascus.

He also maintained Syria’s decades-old policy of political and military interference in Lebanon, and his regime was suspected of high-level involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.

The Hariri killing prompted President Bush to withdraw the U.S.ambassador from Damascus. Seeking improved relations with Syria,President Obama nominated Robert Ford as ambassador and,after the process stalled in Congress, appointed him during a recess last December.”

So slaughtering civilians, including children, execute and massacre them, commit war crimes, destroying block after block, neighbourhood after neighbourhood with the world largest mortar bomb (Russian 240 mm) is OK IF YOU ARE DEEMED A REFORMER by the Obama administration.

“There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believehe’s a reformer.”

–Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on “Face the Nation,”March 27, 2011

“I referenced opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”

–Clinton, two days later

Hillary Clinton is known for making provocative statements, but few have generated such a firestorm as her comment last week that the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, may be a reformer. She made her remarks after “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer noted that Assad’s late father had killed 25,000 people during an uprising against his regime.Clintonresponded by noting that the son was now in power and he was a “different leader.”

Lawmakers and columnists quickly condemned her remarks. So two days later Clinton tried to deflect the criticism by telling reporters she was only referencing “the opinions” of lawmakers who had met with Assad and that she was not speaking for the administration. But then she added: “We’re also going to continue to urge that the promise of reform, which has been made over and over again and which you reported on just a few months ago – I’m a reformer, I’m going to reform, and I’ve talked to members of Congress and others about that, that we hear from the highest levels of leadership in Syria – will actually be turned into reality.”

Officially, the State Department has taken a dim view of Assad’s pledges, describing him as “authoritarian” in the most recent human rights report. “The government systematically repressed citizens’ abilities to change their government,” the report said. “In a climate of impunity, there were instances of arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life.

There’s no question that Assad had promised reform to reporters, most recently in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. But have “many of the members of Congress of both parties” who have met with Assad actually come away from those meetings believing that Assad was a reformer?

Relations between the United States and Syria hit a low point in 2005 after the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated and the Bush administration withdrew the U.S.ambassador.

But President Obama has sought to repair relations, believing a peace deal between Israel and Syria would help stabilize the region. Over congressional opposition, he returned the ambassador to Damascus.

In a meantime, a number of congressional delegations have made trips to Damascusto meet with Assad. Most famously, then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) met with Assad in 2007 over the objections of President Bush, though Republicans such as Rep. Darrell Issa of California also traveled there, believing it was important to maintain a dialogue. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has made repeated visits to Damascus to meet at length with Assad.

We will take it as a given that a number of Democrats believed Assad could be a reformer. On March 16, for instance, Kerry said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: ”So my judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it.”

But what about Republicans? Clinton claimed that “many of the members of both parties” who had gone to Syria “in recent months” had decided Assad was a reformer. The State Department, however, refused to provide any names.

So, using news articles, the Internet and other sources, we tried to identify every Republican lawmaker who had gone to Syria on an official trip since Pelosi’s visit in 2007. We came up with a list of 13 names, some of whom are now retired and some of whom have made repeated visits. We then checked every public statement or news release the lawmakers made about their trips or meetings with Assad.

We could not find anything close to sentiments indicating Assad was a reformer. Issa, for instance, urged a need for dialogue but said that “we should hold no illusions about the regime of Bashar al-Assad.” Issa added, “Our discussions were tense and focused on Syria’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas, interference in Lebanon, the movement of foreign fighters to Iraq and the repression of the Syrian people.”

“Throughout the Middle East uprisings, Clinton has had trouble calibrating her comments to the mood of the moment, such as when she pronounced the Mubarak regime to be “stable’ and “looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” Days later, Mubarak was gone.

But did any of these lawmakers come away from the meeting believing Assad was a reformer? Shelby, through a spokesman, said he never believed or said that (and also did not brief Clinton after the trip). “He has known both the father and son, and believes they are brutal dictators with horrible reputations,” said spokesman Jonathan Graffeo. Other senators on the trip also denied that, though not all immediately responded.

Interestingly, even Kerry seems to have lost patience with Assad, blasting him in a statement on Thursday, just four days after Clinton suggested Assad was a reformer.

“Violence against peaceful protesters is unacceptable — whether in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen or anyplace else — and betrays the values that we, as Americans, respect and that people everywhere should share. I am particularly concerned about the violence against protesters in Syria.President Bashar al-Assad did not use his speech yesterday to promise concrete reforms, including lifting the emergency law. With large protests scheduled for tomorrow, it is essential that his government refrain from using violence against its own people)

The State Department’s refusal to identify these lawmakers is also suspicious, especially after Clinton backtracked and sought to pin the blame for the sentiments she expressed on others. So we are left with a public record that suggests Clinton was exaggerating or inventing the chorus of support on the GOP side.

In fact, Clinton’s remarks gave a highly misleading impression — that there was general consensus by experts on Syria in both parties that Assad was a reformer, even though Clinton’s own State Department reports label him otherwise. “

Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone toSyriain recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.

— Hillary Clinton on Bashar al-Assad, March 27

Few things said by this administration in its two years can match this one for moral bankruptcy and strategic incomprehensibility.

First, it’s demonstrably false. It was hoped that President Assad would be a reformer when he inherited his father’s dictatorship a decade ago. Being a London-educated eye doctor, he received the full Yuri Andropov treatment — the assumption that having been exposed to Western ways, he’d been Westernized. Wrong. Assad has run the same iron-fisted Alawite police state as did his father.

Bashar made promises of reform during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2005. The promises were broken. During the current brutally suppressed protests, his spokeswoman made renewed promises of reform. Then Wednesday, appearing before parliament, Assad was shockingly defiant. He offered no concessions. None.

Second, Clinton’s statement is morally obtuse. Here are people demonstrating against a dictatorship that repeatedly uses live fire on its own people, a regime that in 1982 killed 20,000 in Hama and then paved the dead over. Here are insanely courageous people demanding reform — and the U.S. secretary of state tells the world that the thug ordering the shooting of innocents already is a reformer, thus effectively endorsing the Baath party line — “We are all reformers,” Assad told parliament — and undermining the demonstrators’ cause.

Third, it’s strategically incomprehensible. Sometimes you cover for a repressive ally because you need it for U.S. national security. Hence our muted words about Bahrain. Hence our slow response on Egypt. But there are rare times when strategic interest and moral imperative coincide completely. Syria is one such — a monstrous police state whose regime consistently works to thwart U.S. interests in the region.

During the worst days of the Iraq war, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hezbollah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.

Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.

And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind it. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them.

Why? Because Obama wanted to remain “engaged” with the mullahs — so that he could talk them out of their nuclear weapons. We know how that went.

The same conceit animates his Syria policy — keep good relations with the regime so that Obama can sweet-talk it out of its alliance with Iran and sponsorship of Hezbollah.

Another abject failure. Syria has contemptuously rejected Obama’s blandishments — obsequious visits from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry and the return of the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus since the killing of Hariri. Assad’s response? An even tighter and more ostentatious alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.

Our ambassador in Damascus should demand to meet the demonstrators and visit the wounded. If refused, he should be recalled to Washington. And rather than “deplore the crackdown,” as did Clinton in her walk-back, we should be denouncing it in forceful language and every available forum, including the U.N. Security Council.

No one is asking for a Libya-style rescue. Just simple truth-telling. If Kerry wants to make a fool of himself by continuing to insist that Assad is an agent of change, well, it’s a free country.But Clinton speaks for the nation.”

And on top of that, Hillary Clinton is telling the Syrian freedom protesters to lay down their arms.

“A few weeks ago, Amar met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He presented to her, among other things, information about soldiers who defected and plan to launch a guerilla fight against the army. “To my surprise, she asked that the defectors lay down their arms,” he says. “That’s an odd request. Why didn’t they ask the rebels in Libya to lay down their arms? How can they do it if at any moment they can be fired at and murdered? It’s impractical.”

“I can’t understand why the Americans are silent,” Amar says. “We expected them to intervene. Militarily. To bomb the Syrian army from the air. They intervened in Libya and managed to prompt Gaddafi’s removal, and that is what we expect them to do to Assad now. Thus far, more people were killed in Syria than in Libya at the point where Obama decided to launch a military offensive in order to avert a greater massacre. NATO also bombed in Kosovo when it was necessary. Why this hypocrisy?”

As I wrote in part 1 and 9:

“It is also very interesting to compare how eager the Obama administration, EU and NATO was to go into Libya with their do nothing attitude with Syria.

The dictator Gaddafi had not killed as many civilian people as Assad’s regimes have by a long shot. Or destroyed as many neighbourhoods as Assad. Nor did Gaddafi support so many terrorist groups as Assad. Or had the same strategic value for USA as Syria.

Nor did Gaddafi kill so many Americans as did Assad (Bashar and Hafez al-Assad – It is A Family affair). Etc. Etc.

So in every way and shape or form, in comparison Libya under Gaddafi doesn’t even come close to Syria under Assad.

Samantha Power, a prominent advocate of humanitarian intervention and the principle of ”responsibility to protect”, is considered to be the key figure within the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya.

Power, was a senior foreign policy adviser to senator Obama, and now a Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director of the National Security Council.

But on Syria? NOT A PEEP!

And some of the “excuses” for not doing anything, like “the arms could end up in the wrong hands”, become ABSOLUTELY mind-boggling hypocritical when you remember that NATO and US special operations troops together with their intelligence operatives in Tripoli, armed and put Al-Hakim Belhadj in control over Tripoli. And gave him “the keys” to Gadhafis armoury.

Those arms were advanced items which British and French special operations forces gave the rebels, according to “a senior” American source.

Who is Al-Hakim Belhadj you may ask. He is a leader and commander of LIFG, the Al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Which by the way is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. He is an al Qaeda veteran from Afghanistan, he joined the Talliban etc.

He was first captured in Pakistan 2001 and handed over to US security officials, he was repatriated to Libya two months later. Later CIA captured him in Malaysia in 2004. He was then transferredto Bangkok, where he was then placed in the custody of the CIA. Later they extradited him to Libya where he was kept in prison for six years by Qaddafi.

According to the Spanish, Al-Hakim Belhadj was suspected of complicity in the 2004 Madrid train bombings etc. etc.

For the first time, therefore, the armies of Western members of NATO took part and helped directly in a bid by extremist Islamic forces to capture an Arab capital and overthrow its ruler.”

Then there was NO concern “that it would fuel a proliferation of weapons in the region”. In fact, NATO gave sophisticated weapons to known Al Qaeda groups like LIFG.

As I said before, it is so ABSOLUTELY mind-boggling hypocritical that you just want to throw up.

And while NATO is “concerned”, the Syrian civilian population continues to get slaughtered.

But how cares?

And that Samantha Power, Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director of the National Security Council, mentioned above just got apointed by Obama to head the new White House Atrocities Prevention Board.

But still on Syria? NOT A PEEP!

So apparently she is Very SELECTIVE in which atrocities to “prevent” and when to use “responsibility to protect”.

Or as Tom Hayden posted at the Rag Blog, a far-left website that is home to radical 1960s anti-war leaders, some with previous close ties to Obama, Hayden remarked on Power’s use of war.

Tom Hayden was the principal organizer for the 1960s anti-war movement group Students for a Democratic Society, from which the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group splintered.

Hayden contended that Power’s Balkans experience led her to become an advocate of American and NATO military intervention in humanitarian crises.

“She began to see war as an instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values,” he stated.”

The Saudis and the Gulf countries ALL mistrust Obamas Middle East policy, including his Syrian policy.

Here is just one example from the editor Tariq al-Homayed of the pan-Arab Al-Sharq Al-Awsat:

”The blame for the situation in Syria does not lie with Russia alone; one of the biggest problems is also the Obama administration, which has squandered a golden opportunity to get rid of a significant obstacle to security in the region – and by extension US national security, Bashar al-Assad. However, it is clear that Obama is not concerned with the security of the region – even though it impacts upon international security as a whole, especially with the chaos in Syria overlooking the Mediterranean – rather Obama is preoccupied with his re-election bid.

The US administration has directed as much blame, if not more, towards the Syrian opposition as it has towards al-Assad. What is worse, and indeed a major scandal, is that the Obama administration has said that there could be an al-Qaeda presence [among the opposition] in Syria, even though al-Qaeda ran wild in Iraq under the auspices of the al-Assad regime. When I say this is a scandal, this is because the American newspaper The Washington Post – quoting US intelligence agents – reported that the only evidence Washington has of an al-Qaeda presence in Syria is the style – yes the style – of the bombing that took place in Damascus, and nothing more! The Obama administration is the one calling for the Syrian opposition to unify their ranks, yet Washington knows full well that the unification of the opposition requires international support and hard work, in any situation, not mere statements.

The problem with the current US administration is that it is notorious for misinterpreting events in the region. Here it is suffice to consider Obama’s dealings with the Green Revolution, where instead of supporting it he decided to withdraw from Iraq, leaving it in the hands of al-Maliki and Tehran. With regards to Syria, the Obama administration says that the al-Assad regime is still cohesive, but this is something to be expected for several reasons. Washington knows the extent of Iranian support for al-Assad, in terms of arms, money, men, equipment and all manner of resources, via Iraq. This makes it difficult for any Syrian official to defect. How could they, when they don’t see Obama taking any form of serious stand, and instead opposing the armament of the Syrian opposition and refusing to declare that overthrowing the tyrant of Damascus is an issue of national security?

How could a full military division defect when there is no buffer zone to ensure the protection of the defectors and to help them re-organize their ranks? Those who defected in Libya went to Benghazi, but where would the Syrian defectors go? If the Obama administration wants to see significant and rapid divisions, then it must adopt a firm stance. Let us recall the era of George W. Bush, when the US administration brandished the stick towards al-Assad after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, with an international tribunal just around the corner, at a time when Ghazi Kanaan was rumored to be plotting a coup and was subsequently assassinated!Where is the stick today, and where is the international tribunal?

Furthermore, from reading recent history we would find that no one defected from Saddam Hussein’s regime prior to the US invasion, and even in its early days, because at the time all members were aware that their families would be targeted.The al-Assad regime is worse than Saddam in that regard. But first and foremost, how can the Syrians mobilize when they don’t see a serious stance coming from Washington?

So the problem is not Russia alone, but also the hesitance of President Obama and his administration. Events have been interpreted in the wrong manner, the Syrians have been left alone to face the crimes of the al-Assad regime, and the biggest chance to create stability in the region and curtail Iran’s influence has been lost, so who will tell Obama this?”

“On Monday, the editor of the pan-Arab Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Tariq al-Homayed, penned a column that delivered a scathing critique of the Obama administration’s Syriapolicy. The title of the piece said it all: “Obama is the problem, not just Russia.” While one can’t say for sure, it’s hard to read Homayed’s editorial as anything other than an indicator of Riyadh’s exasperation with Washington’s dithering as the Syrian uprising marks its first year anniversary.

The Saudis’ frustration with the Obama administration’s approach was already evident at the “Friends of Syria” gathering in Tunis last month, when Foreign Minister Saud al-Faysal left the meeting, citing lack of serious action. It was then that al-Faysal publicly went against the administration’s declared policy, calling the arming of the Syrian opposition “an excellent idea.” The Qataris, too, shared the Saudis’ desire for more robust action, including direct support for the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

However, if that’s the case, then why did Riyadh and Doha agree to yet another futile initiative with the Russians, which did nothing but buy more time for Assad to escalate his military campaign? In addition, reports continue to suggest that the Saudis and Qataris remain far from aggressively supplying the FSA with weapons. To answer these questions, one must again turn to Washington.

Last week, an anonymous administration official disclosed that a “decision has been made at the next Friends of Syria meeting to not oppose any proposals to arm the FSA and we’re not going to publicly or privately message on that,” the official said. “We’re not going to publicly or privately tell the Friends of Syria not to do this.”

The problem, of course, is that the administration did continue to message publicly against any lethal support to the FSA, and against any military options more broadly. As late as this Tuesday, the White House spokesman was still repeating the familiar mantra: “It is certainly our position that providing arms is not a move that we’re considering right now because we believe it could heighten and prolong the violence in Syria… So it is our position that we do not want to contribute to the further militarization of Syria because that could lead down a very dangerous road.”

In addition to administration officials making the same arguments in testimonies before Congress, press briefings were organized by intelligence officials with the sole aim of trashing the notion of arming the FSA. Unnamed US officials warned of al-Qaeda’s supposed infiltration of the revolution, and exaggerated to a laughable extent the capabilities of the Assad regime in order to counter any push for military action, which some influential voices in Congress had begun voicing.

At the same time, the US renewed its efforts to engage Russia at the Security Council, introducing a new draft resolution, which, according to one leaked version, calls for a dialogue between the regime and the opposition, thereby making a remarkable concession to Moscow, tantamount to reversing the declared US policy of regime change.

Despite the embarrassing fiasco of the Kofi Annan mission to Syria, and the predictable lack of any progress with the Russians, President Obama yesterday still doubled down on this failed approach.“[F]orus to provide strong support to Kofi Annan, to continue to talk to the Russians, the Chinese and others… that’s the most important work that we can do right now.”

As a result, it’s not hard to see why the Saudis and Qataris felt forced to go through Russia one more time. It was the expressed wish of the President of the United States. A careful rereading of the statement made by the anonymous official to ForeignPolicy.com shows that this was the message communicated to US allies.

The official noted that the USwould take the passive attitude toward arming the FSA “at the next Friends of Syriameeting,” which will take place early next month. In other words, the Obama administration opted to waste a full month banging on the Kremlin’s door, yet again, as Bashar al-Assad escalated his military campaign in Homs, Idlib and Daraa.

The administration has been criticized repeatedly for not asserting leadership when it came to Syria. In reality, however, the administration did very much push its preferences on its regional allies. Its public messaging and diplomatic activity left no doubt that it continued to oppose any military aid to the FSA and that it insisted on going through Moscow one more time, regardless of the time this would buy Assad.

So, although the official said that the administration was not going to “publicly or privately” tell allies not to arm the FSA, as a matter of fact, Washington has been quite verbose these last three weeks, and its message to regional allies, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, against arming the opposition, has been unmistakable. After all, the US Secretary of State herself twice said that arming the Syrian opposition might be like sending weapons to Al-Qaeda.

It’s clear that President Obama, who’s running on a policy of extrication from the region, sees that opening the door to military aid risks drawing the US in. Despite the increased pressure to move in that direction, the president is determined to keep the US out of the game.

This was not lost on Al-Sharq Al-Awsat’s Homayed. “[I]t is clear that Obama is not concerned with the security of the region… rather [he] is preoccupied with his re-election bid,” he wrote in his column.

The Saudis may not yet have gone as far as Senator John McCain, who the other day called the administration’s policy “disgraceful and shameful.” However, with their media now openly labeling President Obama as part of the problem alongside Assad’s Russian allies, they’re hardly being subtle.”

And as I wrote in Part 6 about Turkey:

“And to further prove that point that the Obama administration is ACTIVLY discouraging and opposing ANY small step Turkey wants to take regarding Syria:

“In a previously unreported turn of events, it has now come to light that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in her meeting with Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu last month, emphatically dismissed a number of forward leaning options on Syria that the Turkish top diplomat proposed to the Obama administration.

What this means is that Washington, which at one point subcontracted its Syria policy to Ankara, has now called the Turks off the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

According to well-informed Turkish and US sources, during his meeting with Secretary Clinton, Davutoğlu put forward a set of measures, including, among others, creating a buffer zone and/or a humanitarian corridor, as well as organizing and equipping the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The secretary of state responded in no uncertain terms that the Obama administration had no interest in pursuing any of these options. In fact, according to one account, Clinton told her Turkish counterpart no less than three times, “We are not there.”

This conversation fits well with the administration’s message to other regional allies, namely Saudi Arabia, against arming the FSA and pushing Washington’s preferred policy of going through the Russians, in an attempt to reach a “political solution” to the Syrian crisis.”

“Apparently, the Turks, much like the Saudis, were looking to the first Friends of Syria meeting in Tunis as a possible forum to bypass the Russians and begin a more muscular effort, with US backing. The Saudis found out at the meeting that no such action was forthcoming, and withdrew in frustration, while publicly voicing their preference for arming the Syrian rebels.

The Turks got their answer from Secretary Clinton well before the Tunis gathering, and, according to the Turkish sources, were dismayed at the Obama administration’s extraordinary passivity and refusal to lead.

The message conveyed to the Turks was the same one made clear to the Saudis. According to one US source, when Davutoğlu ended up asking Clinton where the administration was on the issue, her response simply repeated the mantra about the Arab League initiative and going to the Security Council again for another go at the Russians.In other words, it was more of the same.”

“As a result, the administration has found itself in the surreal position of siding closer with Assad’s Russian ally and at cross-purposes with its own regional allies – and, most significantly, in contradiction with its own stated policy of regime change in Syria.”

With “allies” like this who need enemies?

And then is the push by the Obama administration together with Turkey to make SNC (the Syrian National Council), the sole voice for the Syrian uprising i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood. And the sole recipient and controller of money for the uprising.

(See also what I wrote in part 6 about this)

In Syria, America Allies with the Muslim Brotherhood

The president’s support for the Syrian National Council strengthens Islamists.

“While the Obama administration’s burgeoning contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptcontinue to cause controversy, the administration’s policy of growing cooperation with the Syrian opposition continues to enjoy almost unanimous support. This is remarkable, since by virtue of that policy the administration is openly allied with none other than the Muslim Brotherhood: that is, openly, but with perhaps just enough misdirection for the alliance to escape the notice of the broader public.

The Syrian opposition organization that the United Statesand other Western powers have been officially supporting is, of course, the Syrian National Council (SNC). At a meeting in Istanbulon April 1, the so-called Friends of Syria, including the United States, recognized the SNC as “a legitimate representative of all Syrians.” Although the use of the indefinite article suggests there were reservations on the part of some participants, U.S. State Department statements both before and after the Istanbul meeting leave no doubt that the Obama administration treats the SNC as its principal Syrian interlocutor. The SNC is also the presumptive recipient or at least conduit of the aid that the Obama administration has pledged to the Syrian opposition. While in Istanbul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with representatives of the SNC, and she afterwards promised that “there will be more assistance of all kinds for the Syrian National Council.”

But who is the Syrian National Council? Although the chairman and most recognizable face of the council is the secular Paris-based political scientist Burhan Ghalioun, it is openly acknowledged that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is a major force within the council. In fact, there is strong evidence that it is the major force. When several members of the council resigned in mid-March, they cited the overwhelming influence of the Brotherhood as a reason for their decision. “The Brotherhood took the whole council,” departing council member Walid al-Bunni told the New York Times. “We became like extras.”

The Belgian Syria expert Thomas Pierret, a lecturer in contemporary Islam at the Universityof Edinburgh, estimates that “around half” of the SNC’s members are Islamists. According to Pierret, moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood controls the council’s “commission on humanitarian aid” and thereby the distribution of SNC funds in Syria. As a consequence of the repression of the organization by the Syrian regime, the leadership of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has been living in exile for decades. Pierret notes that the Brotherhood now stands accused of using its control over the SNC aid spigot in order to reconstruct a base of popular support within the country. Pierret cites remarks made by Kamal al-Labwani to the Arab press as the source for the accusation. Al-Labwani is one of the SNC members that resigned in March.

The contrast between the controversy surrounding the Obama administration’s outreach to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the widespread indifference to its alliance with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is particularly odd in light of al-Labwani’s accusation regarding the latter’s control of SNC aid money. For, if this accusation is correct, American and other international support for the SNC does not only imply joining forces with the Muslim Brotherhood: It implies helping the Brotherhood to obtain an influence inside Syria that it did not previously have.”

Iran and Obama’s Syrian hesitation

The president fears confronting Assad because of the effect it might have on his nuclear diplomacy.

”Despite months of negotiations by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and extensive Security Council deliberations, hostilities in Syria continue. Although overall violence is down slightly and the council has increased U.N. observers to 300, the civilian death toll continues to rise. Syria’s dictatorship ignores Mr. Annan’s “cease fire,” and Bashar al-Assad himself shows no signs of stepping down.

President Obama seems paralyzed for two basic reasons: First, he is committed to a U.N. process almost certainly doomed to failure; and second, he fears taking on the real nemesis in Syria, namely Iran’s ayatollahs.

The decision to deploy additional military observers was a positive step but the existing observers have hardly displayed much initiative. They have, for instance, declined to monitor anti-Assad demonstrations to avoid, they said, making their mission part of the dispute. One might confuse this with satire were the consequences not so grave.

Perhaps recognizing the U.N.’s lack of real impact to date, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently suggested that the Security Council impose an arms embargo against Syria’s government if hostilities continue. It was unclear, however, if other governments would agree. Neither Russianor Chinahas responded positively. Given their February double veto against stronger sanctions, there is considerable doubt that they would ever allow an effective arms embargo, especially given Russia’s long-standing arms-supplier relationship with Syria.

An enforceable U.N. embargo would require invoking Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, to restore “international peace and security,” which Moscow and Beijing intensely distrust, particularly after Libya. There, the Security Council acted ostensibly to prevent humanitarian tragedy, and NATO then used the mandate to facilitate ousting Moammar Gadhafi. Russia and China will not repeat that mistake. Moreover, they could insist on a total weapons ban, both to Assad and the opposition. In the U.N. world of moral equivalence, they would almost certainly prevail, as with the 1992 arms embargo when the former Yugoslavia broke up.

Mr. Obama’s real failure is not reliance on the cumbersome, ineffective U.N., but his unwillingness to confront Iran, which is determined to maintain Assad in office. Tehran has long treated Syria as a satellite, part of its regional arc of influence that includes terrorist Hezbollah, now politically and militarily dominant in Lebanon. It is prepared to shed considerable Syrian blood to save Assad. The Islamic Republic has supplied arms and financial assistance to the Assad regime, and Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers are on the ground in Syria aiding government forces.

Mr. Obama knows that if he confronts Iran directly in Syria, any chance will disappear for a negotiated settlement to Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. While he should have long ago understood that diplomacy will never persuade Iran to renounce its objective of becoming a nuclear power, he has not. So despite Iran’s obvious role (backed by Russia and China) in defending Assad’s brutality, the president cannot bring himself to admit his Iran policy’s futility. And Mr. Obama is entirely unwilling to risk foreign adventures that might imperil his re-election.

Washington needs to acknowledge that effectively challenging Assad means moving beyond sanctions and diplomacy, and toward regime change in Tehran. Mr. Obama seems unable or unwilling to understand that Iran is an enemy of the U.S. and that its nuclear and regional hegemonic ambitions must be thwarted, or the ayatollahs overturned. Such an uncertain leader cannot handle a critical confrontation effectively. Unfortunately, we may have to wait for a more resolute president rather than proceed and fail inSyria with a weak one.

Israel may not be willing to wait for a firm American hand to deal with Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. And if the conflict in Syria is concluded in Assad’s (and Tehran’s) favor, it could well have significant negative implications for Israel, and for peace and security in the Middle East as a whole. That will be the real cost of Mr. Obama’s fruitless deference to the U.N. process, and of his unwillingness to confront Iran’s mullahs.”

Well the efforts to try to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons have been going on for ages without nothing to show.

Some examples: UN Security Council has passed seven resolutions on Iran since 2006. Including sanctions and an arms embargo.

Result? So far nothing.

EU has been going at it for nine years now, including sanctions, and nothing to show for it.

IAEA has made a lot of reports and resolutions, and nothing has changed.

USA has for a long time imposed many sanctions against Iran (since 1979) but nothing has changed. That is 33 years of futile sanctions that has not achieved its objective.

Other countries like Canada, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland etc also have imposed various sanctions. And nothing has changed.

Etc. Etc.

Now Obama is spinning this wheel another turn. And since he doesn’t want to “offend” Iran, Assad can continue to slaughter his people.

No“responsibility to protect” there.

I could continue for a very long time, there is much more to be said, but this already a way to long post. So I stop here. You get the picture.

Irish economist David McWiliams, of Punk Economics, explains how EU has evolved from a democracy to a bankocracy.

In this illustrated video, he explains Europe’s (and US )’dirty little secret’ where economic policy is being run almost exclusively for the banks. And the political elite are becoming more and more detached from the people.

I disagree on one point; EU was never a democracy in the first place. It was never designed to be that by the political class/elites.

The Euro was always a political project. That’s why “they” haven’t done the ”proper” economic policies. Because these policies would undermine the political purpose of the Euro. So they, the political elites of EU, are trapped. And that’s why the Euro was domed from the beginning.

“How can brokeeconomies lend money to other broke economies who haven’t got any moneybecause they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent to the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent them in the first place because the broke economy cant pay it back”.

Even a 5 year old can understand this. But not “our” politicians and bankers.

There is much to be said about the riots in Britain. And as usual most of it is not said in the mainstream media. So I thought I give you three pieces that are to the point and that give you some perspective of the latest riots. The focus is on the example and behaviour set by the political class/elites. And why we should not be surprised that “things” like these happen.

And I finish with medias role in this.

The Bullingdon Club

“Things got out of hand & we’d had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.”

David Cameron (Prime Minister and leader of the conservative party) recalls his time at Oxford speaking in 1986. And the Boris Johnson he is talking about is the present Mayor of London.

As a young man, he was in a gang that regularly smashed up private property. We know that you were absent parents who left your child to be brought up by a school rather than taking responsibility for his behaviour yourselves. The fact that he became a delinquent with no sense of respect for the property of others can only reflect that fact that you are terrible, lazy human beings who failed even in teaching your children the difference between right and wrong. I can only assume that his contempt for the small business owners of Oxford is indicative of his wider values.

Or Hazel Blears, who was interviewed in full bristling peahen mode for almost all of last night. She once forgot which house she lived in, and benefited to the tune of £18,000. At the time she said it would take her reputation years to recover. Unfortunately not.

But, of course, this is different. This is just understandable confusion over the rules of how many houses you are meant to have as an MP. This doesn’t show the naked greed of people stealing plasma tellies.

Or Jeremy Hunt, who broke the rules to the tune of almost £20,000 on one property and £2,000 on another. But it’s all right, because he agreed to pay half of the money back. Not the full amount, it would be absurd to expect him to pay back the entire sum that he took and to which he was not entitled. No, we’ll settle for half. And, as in any other field, what might have been considered embezzlement of £22,000 is overlooked. We know, after all, that David Cameron likes to give people second chances.

Fortunately, we have the Met Police to look after us. We’ll ignore the fact that two of its senior officers have had to resign in the last six weeks amid suspicions of widespread corruption within the force.

Of course, Mr and Mrs Cameron, your son is right. There are parts of society that are not just broken, they are sick. Riddled with disease from top to bottom.

Just let me be clear about this (It’s a good phrase, Mr and Mrs Cameron, and one I looted from every sentence your son utters, just as he looted it from Tony Blair), I am not justifying or minimising in any way what has been done by the looters over the last few nights. What I am doing, however, is expressing shock and dismay that your son and his friends feel themselves in any way to be guardians of morality in this country.

Can they really, as 650 people who have shown themselves to be venal pygmies, moral dwarves at every opportunity over the last 20 years, bleat at others about ‘criminality’. Those who decided that when they broke the rules (the rules they themselves set) they, on the whole wouldn’t face the consequences of their actions?

Are they really surprised that this country’s culture is swamped in greed, in the acquisition of material things, in a lust for consumer goods of the most base kind? Really?

The last few days have revealed some truths, and some heartening truths. The fact that the #riotcleanup crews had organised themselves before David Cameron even made time for a public statement is heartening.The fact that local communities came together to keep their neighbourhoods safe when the police failed is heartening. The fact that there were peace vigils being organised (even as the police tried to dissuade people) is heartening.

There is hope for this country. But we must stop looking upwards for it. The politicians are the ones leading the charge into the gutter.

David Cameron was entirely right when he said: “It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to think that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities, and that their actions do not have consequences.”

THE riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class.

They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequentedBritish street: that a considerable proportion of the country’s young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.

Unfortunately, while it is totally lacking in self-respect, it is full of self-esteem: that is to say, it believes itself entitled to a high standard of living, and other things, without any effort on its own part.

Consider for a moment the following: although youth unemployment in Britainis very high, that is to say about 20 per cent of those aged under 25, the country has had to import young foreign labour for a long time, even for unskilled work in the service sector.

The reasons for this seeming paradox are obvious to anyone who knows young Britons as I do.

No sensible employer in a service industry would choose a young Briton if he could have a young Pole; the young Pole is not only likely to have a good work ethic and refined manners, he is likely to be able to add up and — most humiliating of all — to speak better English than the Briton, at least if by that we mean the standard variety of the language. He may not be more fluent but his English will be more correct and his accent easier to understand.

This is not an exaggeration. After compulsory education (or perhaps I should say intermittent attendance at school) up to the age of 16 costing $80,000 a head, about one-quarter of British children cannot read with facility or do simple arithmetic. It makes you proud to be a British taxpayer.

I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty, from my experience as a doctor in one of the areas in which a police station has just been burned down, that half of those rioting would reply to the question, ”Can you do arithmetic?” by answering, ”What is arithmetic?”

British youth leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised.

British children are much likelier to have a television in their bedroom than a father living at home. One-third of them never eat a meal at a table with another member of their household — family is not the word for the social arrangements of the people in the areas from which the rioters mainly come. They are therefore radically unsocialised and deeply egotistical, viewing relations with other human beings in the same way as Lenin: Who whom, who does what to whom. By the time they grow up, they are destined not only for unemployment but unemployability.

For young women in much ofBritain, dependence does not mean dependence on the government: that, for them, is independence. Dependence means any kind of reliance on the men who have impregnated them who, of course, regard their own subventions from the state as pocket money, to be supplemented by a little light trafficking. (According to his brother, Mark Duggan, the man whose death at the hands of the probably incompetent police allegedly sparked the riots, ”was involved in things”, which things being delicately left to the imagination of his interlocutor.)

Relatively poor as the rioting sector of society is, it nevertheless possesses all the electronic equipment necessary for the prosecution of the main business of life; that is to say, entertainment by popular culture. And what a culture British popular culture is!

Perhaps Amy Winehouse was its finest flower and its truest representative in her militant and ideological vulgarity, her stupid taste, her vile personal conduct and preposterous self-pity.

Her sordid life was a long bath in vomitus, literal and metaphorical, for which the exercise of her very minor talent was no excuse or explanation. Yet not a peep of dissent from our intelllectual class was heard after her near canonisation after her death, that class having long had the backbone of a mollusc.

Criminality is scarcely repressed any more in Britain. The last lord chief justice but two thought that burglary was a minor offence, not worthy of imprisonment, and the next chief justice agreed with him.

By the age of 12, an ordinary slum-dweller has learned he has nothing to fear from the law and the only people to fear are those who are stronger or more ruthless than he.

Punishments are derisory; the police are simultaneously bullying but ineffectual and incompetent, increasingly dressed in paraphernalia that makes them look more like the occupiers of Afghanistan than the force imagined by Robert Peel. The people who most fear our police are the innocent.

Of course, none of this reduces the personal responsibility of the rioters. But the riots are a manifestation of a society in full decomposition, of a people with neither leaders nor followers but composed only of egotists.”

“Well, I think we can finally say that social welfarism has utterly failed as a project. The case made to me was that welfare, if nothing else, stopped the great unwashed rioting and looting on the streets. This week demonstrates fairly well that it doesn’t even do that.

We have a state school system producing kids who couldn’t and won’t get a job and a wider population who thinks the Easter Bunny will pay for their retirement, housing and day to day needs. Meanwhile, thanks to the cultural gas chambers we laughingly call schools, British business would rather not employ Brits if there is an alternative.

We have a justice system that serves only itself and its welfare clients, while occasionally slapping down the odd tax payer to ensure their obedience to the state. It is a system that works for the perpetrator, not the victim.

And who are these kids tearing down our cities? It is said they are the disenfranchised who have no stake in ”our society”. Kids who feel there is no reason to comply with the basic rules of civil society because it does not pay dividends. Their obedience is required, but for what?

There’s a kid I know who has not had a proper job in over ten year years. I say kid because, for all that he is a grown man, he has remained kid by way of remaining a client of the state. Cosseted with a head full of silly notions about where money comes from, and all that he is ”entitled” to. The reason I continue to help him is because he has not yet given up. He still wants a job and has not resorted to criminality.

He is one of the rare ones who, every week, goes walking round the industrial estates asking for work, applying for anything he can find. But he has no skills. He has nothing to offer them. He has no work experience of value, no qualifications of value and very little natural ability.

What makes him different from the rest of his generation is his willingness to find work. I think most by now would have quit looking and found a way onto the incapacity benefit system. And after ten years of ceaseless heartbreak, I wouldn’t blame him, and I would actually support such a move.

The continual humiliation of going round and round inside the welfare system, a mere statistic in a creaking bureaucracy, fighting for a pittance that makes the difference between starving or not, erodes the soul. To be routinely told you have nothing of value to offer, even if that’s true, cannot be good.

And what has government done in this regard. They have fed him on false hopes. He has been round the system, on this or that training course and placement scheme. His list of ”qualifications” is now longer than some graduates I know. But these ”qualifications” are a contrivance of government, neither useful to, nor demanded by business.

The kid has what is known as a European ”Computer Driving Licence” without possessing any marketable computer skills. The course is useless, the material is easy and all that is served by it is a fat cheque from the government to the public and private bodies who award such junk.

This all at a time when public spending was at an all time high. We have to face the simple fact that it doesn’t work. Throwing money at the problem simply perpetuates it.

Abandoned by his parents and abandoned by the school system to become just another human life on the scrapheap before it has even begun. I have done what I can to help with remedial education but you can’t deprogramme all that sense of entitlement. That lesson has to be taught first hand. But it will probably never happen for him.

You could certainly say he has no stake in society. He is certainly ”disenfranchised”. Thanks to the mechanisms of the state and his background (generational welfare), his fate was sealed early on. He has every right to be angry and frustrated, which indeed he is, but he is not out looting this week.

He has always, with the intervention of friends and distant family, known the difference between right and wrong. He has been known to shoplift the odd tin of beans on the odd occasion when a giro has not gone as far as feeding him. Anyone who has been on the dole long enough, with no family to speak of, would probably confess to likewise. Who of us would not?

What keeps him from rioting is the hope that eventually something will come up, that he will get a break in life. He is perhaps more optimistic than I would be. All evidence suggest that he will not. Especially not now we’re looking down the barrel of a global market meltdown.

But for every one of him who does know the difference between right and wrong, there is evidently a legion that does not. Or maybe does, but does not care. Obedience will bring them nothing but a miserable, unhealthy, unproductive life. One could even say my young friend is dumb, expecting that he will get somewhere pegging his hopes on the system he finds himself in.

We have just enjoyed ten years of unprecedented wealth and opportunity, but for most of these kids, those opportunities weren’t available to them, not speaking Polish being one of the many reasons. All we have done by maintaining a welfare underclass is subsidise a pressure cooker that is now blowing its top. Much like the banking crisis, we have thrown money at a problem to delay the inevitable, only to feel the consequences much harder later on.

After decades learning bit by bit that petty crime is tolerated and they can get away with it, that underclass is now probing the system to see what else they can get away with. The answer is: a lot. This is simply all our chickens coming home to roost. Welfarism, a useless police force, a court system whose moral compass is spinning round faster than ride at Alton Towers, and state school system which at its very best is unfit for purpose.

While that is obvious to most, the statists are fighting for their agenda. They cannot allow the liberation of the poor. The poor are their livelihoods, their clients, their power base. And so the Left must present it in terms of social division. There are vested interests who, once again are trying to make this about race.

We must not allow them to succeed. These are black and white and Asian kids. They are all victims of the state welfare system. If we allow this to become a race debate as we have the last few times, we will simply get more of the same: more red tape for the police, more equality surveys, more outreach workers and more ghettoisation.

The race riots of decades past are no different to these riots in some senses. They are also the result of state mechanisms not only allowing, but facilitating ghettoisation of society, if not by race and faith, then by class. I have always said that if you subsidise poverty, you will always have poverty. We need to stop it. Welfare at best needs to be a temporary lifeline, not a lifetime habit.

But in amongst the disorder, we also see mass larceny by people with full time jobs. Opportunistic theft by supposedly respectable people. Are we a society in moral decline? Were we ever of high moral fibre? We like to think we are more civilised than other countries because of the values we teach. But we’re not. Order is kept because most people live under the illusion that they will be caught if they do bad things. Now they’ve worked out they won’t be. This theft is brazen and is done with impunity.

We know from experience the police will not investigate, let alone catch thieves on a day to day basis. There is no reason to think this will be any different when the lid has blown off the pressure cooker. There was a time when the police would come to a crime scene and take fingerprints (this was my earliest memory of a police encounter), this in the days before super computers.

Now, for all the police resources they will simply turn up, give you a crime number and refer you to your insurance company. Consequently insurance premiums drive up costs for everyone.

The police have largely abdicated from routine police work. They have virtually given up on enforcing narcotics laws. Whatever your views on drugs, the law is the law. But now we have police making their own minds up about which laws to enforce. The law is so out of step with the people, and so unpopular, that if the police want to maintain a level of order, they have to decide which laws to uphold and which to ignore.

The law has made a mockery of itself. We have a law engine spewing out law after contradictory law. Not knowing which way to turn, enforcement becomes neglected in populist areas and so a quota or a crackdown to suit the political zeitgeist is launched resulting in knee-jerk unpopular policing. That is how we arrive here.

So again we draw the same conclusion: this is a crisis of politics. An establishment that does not know what it is for. But that is hardly surprising when that same establishment has abdicated government to other powers. The rot starts at the top. Our government is dysfunctional, without direction, without ambition, without guiding principles and is mired in the institutional larceny of the parasite class.

The immigration system is creaking, the roads are broken, our armed forces in complete disarray, the DVLA has lost the plot, Social Services are bandits, the welfare system is swamped and our energy grid is rapidly running toward rolling blackouts while parasitic corporates asset strip the country for everything it’s worth. And what do we see in government? Children with their infantile preoccupations following one media bandwagon to the next, fire-hosing more borrowed money at problems they created.

Now the streets are littered with broken glass, and the burnt out husks of buildings still smoulder, we again ask what can government do? The answer is nothing. It has demonstrated beyond any doubt that it is incapable of taking grown-up, difficult decisions. Again, that is reflected in the wider population.

We are flat broke and yet we march to stop cuts. We praise the bravery of the police when they stand idly by while the criminals wreck our cities. We are a nation of infants under the illusion that only government can, or should, come to our aid.

Until we reject this notion, put government back in its place and ask the question of what government is actually for, we will be back here again and again. Government is not a creator of jobs or wealth. And nor should it be. In recent years it has been the biggest obstacle to jobs and wealth.

The only way the bulk of our youth can have a stake in society is if we create opportunities for them. We will not give them opportunities by confiscating wealth and redirecting it to the many foreign corporates who build government-mandated projects. Wealth must be left in the hands of those who earn it, to spend as they see fit and to care for those they find deserving.

But while our masters get fat off the proceeds of big government, it is not in their interests to introduce any meaningful reform. They need to subsidize the poor to secure their power base. If we want significant change we must throw the scraps from their table back at them, boycott government involvement in our lives and starve the beast. We must rid ourselves of them and start doing things for ourselves.

They do this to us because we let them. “

And this piece which in all its glaring clarity shows the absurdity of the mainstream media and their total PC view of the world. That is that certain facts, figures, etc. should never, ever be allowed to be mentioned or published, regardless of the circumstances.

And this has nothing to do if it’s black, white, yellow, pink, green or whatever “color”, race or sex, etc. it is. It is about the utter betrayal by journalists and the mainstream old media of their journalistic role, and of all that good and independent journalism was supposed to be.

Instead, the journalist and the media are pushing their political and social agenda.

We have seen this so many times, again and again. On this blog, I have written extensively about press and mass media and their role in this the greatest scientific and political scandal of modern times – the Global Warming Hysteria. And their willing participation in driving and promoting this hysteria.

AT THE SAME TIME, AS THESE MEDIA HAVE TAKEN AN ACTIVE PART in SUPPRESSING FACTS and IS CENSORING AND INTIMIDATING EVERYONE WHO HAS OPPOSED THIS HYSTERIA.

A truly “worthy” goal for the organizations and companies whose goal was supposed to protect and enhance freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

“Funniest interview ever on Sky. Female Sky reporter interviewing a white guy who has had his shops burned. He said to her , the arsonists/looters were all black. She said to him , you can’t say that , there must have been white guys there as well. He thought about and then said , ok they were not all black , i was the only white guy there. Is that ok to say ?

This guy states this with a totally dead pan face without a hint of the pc faux pas.

She again corrects him and states nervously you just cant say they were all black , he responds , but they werei was there.

Unbelievable. The interview describes the state of our society in a nut shell.”

In this to the point, pedagogic and very telling video (by Clarke and Dawe), the whole madness behind the euro and the present crisis in Greece,Spain,Ireland,Portugal,Italy, etc. is explained.

All thanks to our “dear” local and European politicians and banks (private and central banks, ECB) etc.

“Roger, Financial Consultant: They lent all these vast amounts of money to other European economies that can’t possible pay them back.”

“How can brokeeconomies lend money to other broke economies who haven’t got any money because they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent to the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent them in the first place because the broke economy cant pay it back”.

I think even a 5 year old can understand this. But not “our” politicians and bankers.

And remember this video was done a year ago. So now the situation (and the figures) is worse by a factor of two.

Thank you for ruining the common people in all our countries!

And this is on top of their efforts to drive us back to the Stone Age through the Global Warming Hysteria.

They really want us back to the Stone Age to “reduce” our “carbon footprint”.

And how long do you think the people and the modern societies would survive WITHOUT electricity? And what kind of life that would be?

What they are really advocating is huge price increases in the cost of energy, meaning the cost of everything.

That’s it. That’s their plan.

Anything else they say is a lie.

This is a scam to enrich the corrupt.

Just the latest example of this is this quote from Steve Holliday, chief executive of the National Grid (UK) from The Daily Telegraph, 2nd March 2011:

‘Era of constant electricity at home is ending, says power chief.

Electricity consumers in the UK will need to get used to flicking the switch and finding the power unavailable. Families will have to get used to only using power when it was available, rather than constantly.”

What a brilliant future the Global Warming Hysterics have in store for humankind. And remember they have publicly said and written that they would like to halve, or even cut in two thirds, the world population. Well, wind power is on way of getting about it.

These people are so caring are they not? And they REALLY love humankind.

Here are just a few examples around the world of the growing realisation of the huge cost and unreliability of wind/solar power:

“The economic candle in the U.K. is being blown out by wind power. The Verso study finds that after the annual diversion of some 330 million British pounds from the rest of the U.K. economy, the result has been the destruction of 3.7 jobs for every “green” job created.

The study concludes that the “policy to promote renewable energy in the U.K. has an opportunity cost of 10,000 direct jobs in 2009-10 and 1,200 jobs in Scotland.” So British taxpayers, as is the case here in the U.S., are being forced to subsidize a net loss of jobs in a struggling economy.

“There’s a big emphasis in Scotland on the economic opportunity of investing in renewable energy,” says study co-author and Verso research director Richard Walsh. “Whatever the environmental merits, we have shown that the case for green jobs just doesn’t stack up.”

Again, it’s been shown that wind energy can’t hold a candle to other more traditional and more reliable forms of energy.

“The Scottish renewable sector is very reliant on subsidies from the rest of the U.K.,” co-author Tom Miers adds. “Without the U.K.-wide framework, it would be very difficult to sustain the main policy tolls to promote this industry.”

As here, only continuous subsidies and redistribution of resources to an unproductive and uncompetitive source of energy keeps the alternative energy industry alive, politically and economically.”

“Calzada noted that these are direct job losses. “The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to high energy prices,” he said in an interview.”

“The study concludes that the ”policy to promote renewable energy in the UK has an opportunity cost of 10,000 direct jobs in 2009-10 and 1,200 jobs in Scotland”. So British taxpayers, as is the case in the US, are being forced to subsidise a net loss of jobs in a struggling economy.

I suppose it could be worse, though … they could be building electric vans.”

“The renewable energy industry is helping to destroy the UK economy and drive up unemployment says a new report. For every one of David Cameron’s “green jobs” created in the renewable energy sector (mainly solar and wind), another 3.7 jobs are being lost in the real economy, says the independent study by Verso Economics. In total, measurable policies to promote renewable energy cost £1.4 billion in the UK and £168 million in Scotland in 2009/10. But this doesn’t take into account the additional economic damage inflicted by the erection of enormous, bird-chopping monstrosities all over some of Britain’s most attractive tourist spots – including, for example, the hitherto unspoilt island of Tiree.(H/T Michael Daly).”

Why the £250bn wind power industry could be the greatest scam of our age – and here are the three ‘lies’ that prove it

“Scarcely a day goes by without more evidence to show why the Government’s obsession with wind turbines, now at the centre of our national energy policy, is one of the greatest political blunders of our time.

Under a target agreed with the EU, Britain is committed within ten years — at astronomic expense — to generating nearly a third of its electricity from renewable sources, mainly through building thousands more wind turbines.

But the penny is finally dropping for almost everyone — except our politicians — that to rely on windmills to keep our lights on is a colossal and very dangerous act of self-deception.

Take, for example, the 350ft monstrosity familiar to millions of motorists who drive past as it sluggishly revolves above the M4 outside Reading.

This wind turbine performed so poorly (working at only 15 per cent of its capacity) that the £130,000 government subsidy given to its owners was more than the £100,000 worth of electricity it produced last year.

Meanwhile, official figures haveconfirmed that during those freezing, windless weeks around Christmas, when electricity demand was at record levels, the contribution made by Britain’s 3,500 turbines was minuscule.

To keep our homes warmwe were having to import vast amounts of power from nuclear reactors in France.

Wind turbines are so expensive that Holland recently became the first country in Europe to abandon its EU renewable energy target, announcing that it is to slash its annual subsidy by billions of euros.

So unpopular are wind turbines that our own Government has just offered ‘bribes’ to local communities, in the form of lower council tax and electricity bills.”

“So riddled with environmental hypocrisy is the lobbying for wind energy that a recent newspaper report exposed the immense human and ecological catastrophe being inflicted on northern China by the extraction of the rare earth minerals needed to make the giant magnets that every turbine in the West uses to generate its power.”

“The first is the pretence that turbines are anything other than ludicrously inefficient.

The most glaring dishonesty peddled by the wind industry — and echoed by gullible politicians — is vastly to exaggerate the output of turbines by deliberately talking about them only in terms of their ‘capacity’, as if this was what they actually produce. Rather, it is the total amount of power they have the capability of producing.

The point about wind, of course, is that it is constantly varying in speed, so that the output of turbines averages out at barely a quarter of their capacity.

This means that the 1,000 megawatts all those 3,500 turbines sited around the country feed on average into the grid is derisory: no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

Furthermore, as they increase in number (the Government wants to see 10,000 more in the next few years) it will, quite farcically, become necessary to build a dozen or more gas-fired power stations, running all the time and emitting CO2, simply to provide instant back-up for when the wind drops.”

“The second great lie about wind power is the pretence that it is not a preposterously expensive way to produce electricity. No one would dream of building wind turbines unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy.

This comes in the form of the Renewables Obligation Certificate subsidy scheme, paid for through household bills, whereby owners of wind turbines earn an additional £49 for every ‘megawatt hour’ they produce, and twice that sum for offshore turbines.

This is why so many people are now realising that the wind bonanza — almost entirely dominated in Britain by French, German, Spanish and other foreign-owned firms — is one of the greatest scams of our age.

The third great lie is that this industry is somehow making a vital contribution to ‘saving the planet’ by cutting our emissions of CO2 – it is not What other industry gets a public subsidy equivalent to 100 or even 200 per cent of the value of what it produces?

We may not be aware of just how much we are pouring into the pockets of the wind developers, because our bills hide this from us — but as ever more turbines are built, this could soon be adding hundreds of pounds a year to our bills.

When a Swedish firm recently opened what is now the world’s largest offshore windfarm off the coast of Kent, at a cost of £800million, we were told that its ‘capacity’ was 300 megawatts, enough to provide ‘green’ power for tens of thousands of homes.

What we were not told was that its actual output will average only a mere 80 megawatts, a tenth of that supplied by a gas-fired power station — for which we will all be paying a subsidy of £60million a year, or £1.5billion over the 25-year lifespan of the turbines.”

“Then, of course, the construction of the turbines generates enormous CO2 emissions as a result of the mining and smelting of the metals used, the carbon-intensive cement needed for their huge concrete foundations, the building of miles of road often needed to move them to the site,and the releasing of immense quantities of CO2 locked up in the peat bogs where many turbines are built.”

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond reveals his ignorance of wind power

“The fact is that no one would dream of building these absurdly inefficient machines unless they were guaranteed a 100 per cent subsidy through the Renewables Obligation. This forces electricity companies to buy the power produced by onshore wind at twice the market rate, paid by all of us through our electricity bills.In the case of the offshore turbines that the Government is so keen on, this subsidy is doubled to 200 per cent.”

“Britain is moving faster than any other European country to contain a surge in solar power and prevent the boom-and-bust seen in Spain and predicted for the Czech Republic. The risk is scaring off the investors who would create the “green jobs” Prime Minister David Cameron is seeking to revive the economy.

“It’s going to completely kill the market,” said Tim German, renewable energy manager for the local government in Cornwall at the U.K.’s southwest tip. “Investors are starting to get cold feet.”

“The new Dutch right-wing government has announced a radical overhaul of Dutch energy policy. It is cutting subsidies for most forms of renewable energy drastically, and is even putting an end to all subsidies for offshore wind, solar power and largescale biomass.It has also announced a warm welcome for new nuclear power stations – the first time a Dutch government has done so since the Chernobyl-disaster in 1986.”

“It was probably the huge subsidy allocated to a 600 MW offshore wind park by the previous government that induced the new Dutch cabinet to make some drastic changes in the existing subsidy scheme for renewable energy. In May 2010, the previous government announced that the German wind power developer Bard Engineering will receive a whopping (maximum) subsidy of €4.5 billion from the Dutch taxpayer to build two 300 MW offshore wind parks off the country’s northern coast. The new right-wing government, a coalition of the liberal party VVD and the Christian-Democrats CDA, supported by the anti-islam party PVV, decided they would not make the same mistake. During the election campaign, the new Prime Minister, Mark Rutte of the Liberals, had been cynical about the large government support for wind power. ‘Windmills turn on subsidies’, he had said.

Thus, when on 30 November, the new Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, heavyweight Maxime Verhagen, a Christian-Democrat, unveiled the new government’s policy on renewable energy, it was no surprise that this included a large cutback of green subsidies: from about €4 billion a year to just €1.5 billion. The new scheme is more than a cutback, though – it also aims at a radical overhaul of the existing methodology behind the allocation of subsidies. The plan intends to reward and stimulate “efficient” (cheap) forms of renewable energy, such as onshore wind power, and does not support relatively inefficient (expensive) renewables, such as offshore wind.”

“Wind power is very dilute, and thus a large area of land is required to gather significant energy. Wind energy needs a wide network of roads, transmission lines and turbines which degrades any area containing wind farms. It has a huge land footprint.

The operating characteristics of turbine and generator mean that only a small part of wind energy can be captured.

Wind power is also intermittent, unreliable and hard to predict. Therefore large backup or storage systems are required. This adds to the capital and operating costs and increases the instability of the network.

Wind farms are uniformly hated by neighbours and will not be willingly accepted without heavy compensation payments. Their noise, flicker, fire risk and disturbing effect on domestic and wild animals are well documented.

The wind is free but wind power is far from it. Its cost is far above all conventional methods of generating electricity. Either taxpayers or consumers will pay this bill.”

“The blades can only extract part of the energy, thus slowing down the wind in the process. The maximum proportion of the energy that can be extracted by a perfect propeller in a perfect wind is given by the Betz limit and that limit is about 59%. This is referred to as the Power Co-efficient. In the real world the very best turbines in an ideal wind could maybe peak at about 50%. Most large wind turbines built today have a Power Coefficient (PC) of no more than 37%.

If the wind speed is higher or lower than ideal, the PC will be lower. If the wind blows too fast, much kinetic energy slips between the blades and is lost. And in very high winds, the turbines are shut down completely so they do not shake themselves to bits.

But that is not the end of the weaknesses of wind power generation.

The spinning turbine has to be converted into electrical energy at each turbine. This is done using an electric generator. Electrical generators have been used for over 100 years so their technology is mature and their performance well known.

Electric generators achieve maximum efficiency at their design capacity. This is planned to suit the ”average” wind speed, and the generator produces maximum safe output at this speed. If the wind drops, so does the power generated. If the wind rises, the energy generated is limited to the design capacity of the generator (by varying the pitch of the blades) and at some point the generator is shut down to prevent burnout. So the generator cuts off all the high-energy infrequent wind, in order to capture the maximum energy from the winds expected by the turbine designers at that location. These unavoidable operating characteristics of the turbine also reduce the power generated.”

“In percentage terms, how much electricity do Britain’s 3,150 wind ­turbines supply to the ­National Grid?

Is it: a) five per cent; b) ten per cent; or c) 20 per cent? Come on, I’m going to have to hurry you. No conferring.

Time’s up. The correct answer is: none of the above. Yesterday afternoon, the figure was just 1.6 per cent, according to the official website of the wholesale electricity market.

Over the past three weeks, with demand for power at record levels because of the freezing weather, there have been days when the contribution of our forests of wind turbines has been precisely nothing.

It gets better. As the temperature has plummeted, the turbines have had to be heated to prevent them seizing up. Consequently, they have been consuming more electricity than they generate.

Even on a good day they rarely work above a quarter of their theoretical capacity. And in high winds they have to be switched off altogether to prevent damage.

At best, the combined output of these monstrosities is equal only to that of a single, medium-sized, gas-fired power station.”

“WIND power should not be relied on to guarantee electricity supply during hot days, experts say.

Wind turbines operate at less than three per cent of their total generation in hot weather because limits to prevent overheating and a lack of wind can stifle their output when temperatures soar past 35C.

The State Government and the Australian Energy Market Operator yesterday revealed there would be enough electricity in SA today to meet demand and loadshedding and blackouts would not occur from a lack of power. However, AEMO statistics show the amount of electricity generated by wind turbines in hot weather falls to a bare minimum.

”The reduction in wind generation during peak periods, or at the hottest times of the day, is partially attributed to limits placed on some turbines at high temperatures to prevent overheating,” an AEMO spokeswoman said.”

This one is 3 years old but an actual and interesting example of the consequences of the unreliability of wind power when most needed.

HOUSTON (Reuters) – A drop in wind generation late on Tuesday, coupled with colder weather, triggered an electric emergency that caused the Texas grid operator to cut service to some large customers, the grid agency said on Wednesday.

Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as colder temperatures moved into the state.”

“Combine cold temperatures that make steel brittle along with gusty winds, and you have a Titanic recipe for disaster. For those that will argue that I’m being unfair to the promise of wind power, I welcome you to provide photos of any power plant in the USA that has been collapsed due to weather. Downed power poles sure, but power sources?”

“In the case of wind generators if there is a measurable likelihood of fires occurring and

with the lack of constant supervision of such high energy equipment it would be a real expectation that the owners of the generators would be liable for all the fire damage, which could reach into the billions if they caused fires on days of extreme fire danger.”

“It has been reported that about 20 turbines catch fire and burn each year. The global total number of turbines appears to be around 68 000. All these figures are World Wide Web data and some from Wikipedia. They provide a rough guide to quantifying the bushfire risk but should not be taken as definitive. Applying the global data to the 2000 or so turbines installed in Australia we would expect a 60% probability of one turbine fire each year.”

“Off shore wind farms cost twice as much to produce electricity as gas and coal powered stations and will need subsidies for at least 20 years, a major report warns.

But costs of building the farms have doubled due to spiralling prices for steel and the drop in the value of the pound.

The running costs are also increasing.

The report found that costs have risen for all kinds of generation but off shore wind farms remain by far the most expensive – 90 per cent more than fossil fuel generators and 50 per cent more than nuclear. “

“In summary, the Netherlands experience is that at wind penetration of about 3% the fossil fuel and CO2 emissions saving is reduced to zero. As wind penetration is increased, the Colorado and Texas experience shows that the savings become negative, that is, fossil fuel and CO2 emissions are increased.”

“German lawmakers passed on Thursday a law cutting solar power subsidies by up to 15 percent from this summer, six months earlier than originally planned, dealing a blow to the world’s biggest photovoltaic market.

The lower parliamentary house voted to introduce the cuts for roof installations from July and for ground-based cell assemblies from September.”

“The Spanish and Germans are doing it. So are the French. The British might have to do it. Austerity-whacked Europe is rolling back subsidies for renewable energy as economic sanity makes a tentative comeback. Green energy is becoming unaffordable and may cost as many jobs as it creates.”

“Sunny Spain became the world’s top solar power producer. Since 2002, about €23-billion has been invested in Spain’s photovoltaic (PV) industry, which sucked up €2.7-billion in subsidies in 2009 alone, or more than 40 per cent of the freebies doled out to the country’s entire renewables sector.”

“Renewable energy is fraught with difficulties. In less-sunny climates, PV panels make little sense, though that hasn’t stopped Germany and Britain from installing them on rooftops everywhere. Wind power is becoming hugely popular in some parts of the world. But since the wind doesn’t always blow, backup power has to be installed. That means consumers have to pay for the capacity twice and the backup power is usually of the fossil-fuel variety. Denmark, which has a reputation as the cleanest of the clean countries, actually generates about half its electricity from coal, the grubbiest fuel. That proportion hasn’t varied in a decade in spite of the country’s relentless pursuit of wind power.”

The haul included no fewer than 43 wind and solar energy companies and around 100 properties including swank villas with swimming pools in Sicily’s western Trapani region, along with cars, a catamaran and bank accounts, the interior ministry said.

The infiltration of organised crime into the renewable energy sector is ”a combination that is only now coming to light” in terms of legal action, said Abbate, a specialist in Mafia affairs who is under police protection.”

Steve Goreham (”Climatism”) quotes US and UK electricity generating costs (excluding the cost of carbon permits and the cost of backup generating facilities for wind and solar):

Goreham (p272) also compares the planned London Array offshore wind field with the planned Kingsnorth Coal fired plant and concludes:

”The wind turbine array requires 563 times more land than the coal plant and delivers electricity intermittently at twice the cost.”

As always, a very refreshing and direct to the point speech by Nigel Farage in the EU- parliament on November 24(see video below):

“We don’t want that flag, we don’t want the anthem, we don’t want this political class, we want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history.”

“Just who the hell do you think you people are? You are very, very dangerous people indeed.Your obsession with creating this Euro-State means that you’re happy to destroy democracy. You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro-Dream can continue.”

“If you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.”

As I have said many times:

The political elite in Europe DELIBERATELY constructed the Lisbon Treaty so that the common people COULD NOT UNDERSTAND IT and comprehend what was going on.

I.E. THE LARGEST TRANSFER OF SOVEREIGNTY AND POWER FROM the people and local governments to the EU central level.

And the people were NOT allowed to have their say and to vote on it. With one exception, Ireland. Its constitution made it impossible for the politicians not to have a referendum.

The result – the people of Ireland voted NO 54 to 46 %.

But of course – The political elite in Europe doesn’t accept a NO from the people.

They started their maneuvering, twisting, some minor concessions here some more money and transfers there etc.

At ALL COST they had to have a Yes on this one. And they got one a year later.

How many times does the voters have to vote NO before NO is really a NO? Or what part of NO! don’t you understand?

And a very INTERESTING Account of how former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in a meeting with Gorbachev in January 1989, told Gorbachev that Europe in 15 years time is going to be a FEDERALSTATE.

How in the HELL DID HE KNOW THAT??????

Well the answer is very simple – because that’s been the plan all along from the political elite in Europe.

And surprise, surprise, he become the author of the European constitution (2002-03).

Wouldn’t you say that that was another “lucky” coincidence?

Nigel Farage’s speech very accurately describes the EU mess and the consequences for the common people who have to pay the price for this elitist political project. But he is a rare exception – most politicians in the EU countries ARE STILL LOUDLY praising and singing the hallelujah choir.

Here in Sweden ALL political parties (except the new SD party) now support EU. The greens and the communists, who were opposed, now in practice accept it.

It is fantastic – The whole political class in every country has WILLINGLY AND GLADLY SURRENDERED their national sovereignty and power to EU AGAINST THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE IN ALL THESE COUNTRIES.

After the Lisbon Treaty the national parliaments are a mere joke and charade for local consumption, since 70-80 of all decisions now are all ready made and decided in Brussels. The national parliaments roll is in practice just to put a “local flavor” on what have already been decided in Brussels.

Above a short but very succinct description of the Lisbon Treaty and what it really means for the common people.

The EU’s president Herman Van Rompuy:

”Today, people are discovering what a ‘common destiny’ in monetary matters means. They are discovering that the euro affects their pensions, savings, and jobs, their very daily life. It hurts,” he said.”

The political elite in Europe DELIBERATELY constructed the Lisbon Treaty so that the common people COULD NOT UNDERSTAND IT and comprehend what was going on.

I.E. THE LARGEST TRANSFER OF SOVEREIGNTY AND POWER FROM the people and local governments to the EU central level.

And the people were NOT allowed to have their say and to vote on it. With one exception, Ireland. Its constitution made it impossible for the politicians not to have a referendum.

The result – the people of Ireland voted NO 54 to 46 %.

But of course – The political elite in Europe doesn’t accept a NO from the people.

They started their manoeuvring, twisting, some minor concessions here some more money and transfers there etc.

At ALL COST they had to have a Yes on this one. And they got one a year later.

How many times does the voters have to vote NO before NO is really a NO? Or what part of NO! don’t you understand?

And a very INTERESTING Account of how former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in a meeting with Gorbachev in January 1989, told Gorbachev that Europe in 15 years time is going to be a FEDERALSTATE.

How in the HELL DID HE KNOW THAT??????

Well the answer is very simple – because that’s been the plan all along from the political elite in Europe.

And surprise, surprise, he become the author of the European constitution (2002-03).

Wouldn’t you say that that was another “lucky” coincidence?

Below are just a small number of articles describing the EU mess and the consequences for the common people who have to pay the price for this elitist political project.

“UKIP health spokesman David Campbell Bannerman said: “People’s health and in some cases their very lives will be put at risk at the altar of being good Europeans.” Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said: “It beggars belief that patients are to be put at such obvious risk from EU legislation.”

Safety tests on EU nurses working in Britain scrapped for being ‘discriminatory’

“Ministers are ready to hand sweeping Big Brother powers to EU states so they can spy on British citizens.

Foreign police will be able to travel to the UK and take part in the arrest of Britons. They will be able to place them under surveillance, bug telephone conversations, monitor bank accounts and demand fingerprints, DNA or blood samples.

Anyone who refuses to comply with a formal request for co-operation by a foreign-based force is likely to be arrested by UK officers. “

“Belgium has acknowledged that there will be a major battle over proposals to give the EU powers to vet budgets before they are presented to national parliaments.

Formal legislative proposals on ”budget peer review” and increased ”budgetary surveillance” to prevent another euro zone debt crisis will be tabled by the Commission Wednesday.

”There is a question of sovereignty if the role of the European Commission in economic government is reinforced,” admitted the Belgian source.

Belgian officials, with strong French and German support, are pushing hard to set up new EU supervisors to police financial markets, giving European authorities the power to dictate to regulators in the City of London. ”It is necessary to transfer some decisions away from national to European authorities,” said the source.

EU officials have warned British diplomats that the Lisbon Treaty means it will have to compromise on sovereignty because Britain does not have veto for either the budget scrutiny or financial market supervision measures.

Belgium is also ready to pick a fight with Britain over plans for new European-wide taxes to directly fund the EU independently of contributions from national treasuries.

”We can also explore, for example, the financing of European projects via new sources of revenue,” said the government source.”

“explained why the euro has always been a monstrosity, and why it will and must fail. Although the current plans to ”get a living corpse to walk” are touching, he scoffed, one thing is already clear: The euro bailout package will only save the banks.”

Wilhelm Hankel, professor for currency and development policy, Ministry for Economic Cooperation, the Foreign Office, chief economist of Bank for Reconstruction, the head of the department of money and credit in the Ministry for Economic Affairs and one of the closest staff members to the German economy minister Karl Schiller. etc.

”As was once the case before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Europe‘s politicians have now lost any sense for the rights, concerns and expectations of their citizens.”

Dieter Spethmann, the former CEO of the giant German industrial conglomerate Thyssen.

“He criticizes Berlin for demanding solidarity with Europe while demonstrating no solidarity whatsoever with its people. Hundreds of billions of euros are being destroyed in Germany ”because the country has taken on the role of the monetary union’s paymaster,” Nölling says. ”In violation of all laws, we are being forced to rescue a currency that cannot be saved.”

Wilhelm Nölling, former member of the Bundestag for the SPD, finance minister for the city-state of Hamburg and president of Hamburg’s state central bank.

“But he finds it undemocratic that citizens are simply being forced to be part of a community in which one country is required to bail out another. ”What is happening here is almost dictatorial,”

“This was done by permanent representatives, known as ”EU ambassadors” who met behind closed doors yesterday to sign off the amendment. The amendment must now be ratified in all the Union’s 27 countries and will require primary legislation in the UK – ”potentially opening up dissent among Conservative MPs who campaigned for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.”

Actually, though, it isn’t an amendment to the Lisbon Treaty. According to the EU Council, it is a ”protocol amending the protocol on transitional provisions annexed to the treaty on European Union, to the treaty on the functioning of the European Union and to the treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community.”

Now, if you can actually work out what that is saying, we are talking about an addendum amending an addendum which sets out changes to transitional provisions. It doesn’t even change a treaty. It simply changes the speed at which a previously agreed change to the treaty comes into force.”

Ordinary people were misled over impact of the euro, says Herman Van Rompuy

In the first public admission of the scale of the popular backlash, Mr Van Rompuy acknowledged that ”growing public awareness” of the euro zone’s problems was ”a major political development.”

”Today, people are discovering what a ‘common destiny’ in monetary matters means. They are discovering that the euro affects their pensions, savings, and jobs, their very daily life. It hurts,” he said.”

“The President of the European Council, the body that brings together EU leaders in summits, also confessed that the euro had been flawed from the moment of its creation in 1992, a situation that had not been made clear to voters.

”We are clearly confronted with a tension within the system, the ill-famous dilemma of being a monetary union and not a full-fledged economic and political union,” he said. ”This tension has been there since the single currency was created. However, the general public was not really made aware of it.”

“Vincenzo Scarpetta, an analyst for the pressure group, said: ”The euro zone crisis is not simply about economic failure but also a breakdown in trust between the political class and European citizens. The EU elite simply got it wrong on the euro.”

“What we are witnessing here is a judgment on the entire deceitful and self-deceiving way in which the ”European project” has been assembled over the past 53 years. One of the most important things to understand about that project is that it has only ever had one real agenda. Everything it has done has been directed to one ultimate goal, full political and economic integration. The headline labels put on the various stages of that process may have changed over the years, such as building first a ”common market”, then a ”single market”, finally a ”constitution”. But by far the most important project of all was locking the member states into a single currency.

This was always above all a political not an economic project, to be driven through at any cost, which was why all those ”Maastricht criteria” laid down to bring it about were repeatedly breached. But as expert voices were warning as long ago as the 1970s, when it was first put on the agenda, there was no way economic and monetary union could work unless it was run by a single all-powerful economic government, with the power to raise taxes.

As was advised by Sir Donald MacDougall’s report to Brussels in 1978, it could only work if, following the US model, between 20 and 25 per cent of Europe’s GDP was available to such a government, to enable a huge transfer of wealth from richer countries such as Germany to the poorer, more backward countries of southern Europe – and how ironically has that come about!

When the 10-year-long construction of the euro began in the 1990s, all these warnings were ignored. The cart was put before the horse. So fixated were the Eurocrats on the need to get their grand project in place that the ”rules” were treated as mere window dressing. The member states were locked together willy-nilly in a one-size-fits-all system, with a single low interest rate, enabling countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece to live on a seemingly limitless sea of borrowed money. And now, entirely predictably, judgment day has come.”

As alarming as anything, with this tsunami roaring down on us, has been the sight of our new leaders preening themselves with their list of irrelevant little ”coalition policies” and babyish boasts about the ”greatest democratic shake-up since the 1832 Reform Act”, as if none of this was happening. As one analyst put it: ”They are like children let loose in the sweet shop, seemingly oblivious to the horrendous reality unfolding before us.”

”It is not just the Communists who are worrying about this. There are a great numbers of Portuguese who are concerned that this country built over the centuries, for better or worse, on a foundation of sovereignty and independence is endangered by accepting everything that comes from Brussels without a trace of patriotism. The EU’s claim of economic and social cohesion is just propaganda,” he told Publico. “

“It was refreshing to read ”The Euro Burns” by Michael Schlecht, Die Linke’s economic guru, arguing that the primary cause of Euroland’s crisis is ”German wage-dumping”. He shows from Eurostat data that German labour costs rose 7pc between 2000 and 2008, compared to 34pc in Ireland, 30pc in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, 28pc in Greece and Holland, and 20pc in France. Again, my loose translation.

Germany ran an accumulated trade surplus of €1,261bn over the period, while Spain ran a deficit of €598bn, and Portugal €273bn. This shell game was kept afloat by recycling German capital to Club Med debt markets beyond sustainable levels until it all blew up over Greece. The Club Med victims are now trapped. “

“The North-South divide within EMU has been allowed to go so far that any solution must now be offensive to either side, and therefore will be resisted. The euro is becoming an engine of intra-European tribal hatred. Brilliant work, Monsieur Delors.”

Less influence and a slower recovery: the dangers for Britain of crisis at heart of eurozone

“While every one of the 27 EU member states is looking to cutting public expenditure – some more than others – the EU is demanding a £6.3 billion increase in its budget to bring its spending ”into line with its new powers under the Lisbon Treaty.”

So much for the claim that Lisbon was a mere amending treaty, but then the ”colleagues” always have lived on a diet of lies, confident that when the chips are down, they can still hold out their hands and the member state governments will come rushing to throw money at them.

In the 2010/11 financial period, British taxpayers will have to hand over £7.9 billion – that is £7,900,000,000, or more than £400 for every household – to keep the ”colleagues” in the luxury they most certainly do not deserve, while the EU enjoys a budget of£113 billion for its 2011 financial year (which coincides with the calendar year).

This situation is beyond irony as the commission has been urging on member state governments cutbacks in their own finances, and – according to Bruno Waterfield – is calling for a six percent cut in British public spending by 2013.

At the same time, we are continually assailed by EU laws and requirements which further add to the cost of governance and daily life, all promulgated by institutions where profligacy is their middle name. And to this, we append our now ritual question – and the reason we do not rise up and slaughter them all is?

The question becomes less rhetorical with each passing day – the pics are of the Résidence Palace in Brussels, that £280 million monstrosity to house the European Council, symbol of being ”in Europe but not ruled by Europe,” as that idiot Cameron would have us believe.”

“It is easy to overcook the idea of the European Union being in crisis. It is always said—by its supporters and its critics alike—to be approaching one sort of exciting denouement or another. But then it passes, the caravan moves on and in time another potential disaster that can be negotiated around swings into view.”

“Even the death of the EU constitution, which seemed like a serious impediment to the progress of the project, wasn’t much of a setback in the end. It was simply reborn as the Lisbon Treaty.

The motive force behind the EU is integration and the creation of a continent-wide power block. National governments and the Brussels-based bureaucracyhave so much invested in advancing that cause that any obstacles will not be allowed to cause more than temporary interruptions. They have become expert at improvising ways to press on regardless.”

“Yes, after much wrangling a deal to support stricken Greece is in place, but only with the Germans enforcing strict conditions. This is a sticking plaster solution. What must come, logically, is something close to a form of economic government by those states that want to stay as the inner core of the euro. It might be called by another name, but that is what it will be.

And that leads to a full-blown political crisis for the EU itself. The choice for various countries then is between trying to be part of an inner core organized around the euro with coordinated fiscal policy, or standing outside it in a trading zone built on cooperation rather than coercion.

The Eurosceptics, in countries such as Britain, are just starting to realize this. The euro’s problems will force its strongest members into much closer integration than even they currently envisage. Other than breaking up the euro they can do nothing else—standing still isn’t an option. In this way that old discussion about there being two distinct Europe’s inside the EU is coming back rapidly into fashion. Sounds like it has the makings of a proper crisis.”

The EU has become a lumbering, unaccountable mess, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker, Published: 7:00PM BST 11 Sep 2010

The latest findings of Eurobarometer, the EU’s own polling organisation, show that less than half its citizens now believe it is a “good thing”. In many countries, its popularity is at record lows, and only 19 per cent see the EU as “democratic” (in Britain, Finland and Latvia this is as low as 10 per cent).

What makes this particularly ironic is that in 2001 the EU’s leaders issued their Laeken Declaration, admitting that the EU faced a crisis through its “democratic deficit”. Their remedy was the process designed to give Europe a “constitution”. After eight years of negotiation, obfuscation, lies and referendum-reverses, they got the constitution they wanted (although they had to disguise it as the Lisbon Treaty).The upshot of this tortuous attempt to “bring Europe closer to its peoples” is that those peoples see the EU as less democratic than ever.

Meanwhile, armed with its new powers, the inflated engine of our EU government rolls on, more power-crazed than ever. It is spending £800 million on setting up its new worldwide diplomatic service, with 100 of its officials earning more than our own shrunken and virtually irrelevant Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Also now on the table are the EU’s options for imposing its own taxes, the front-runner being a tax on financial transactions to which Britain, as a world financial centre, would contribute 70 per cent, more than 300 billion euros a year. Britain and the City will also be hit hardest by the EU’s seizure of control over the regulation of financial services.

Our Chancellor, George Osborne, has just conceded the EU’s right to “supervise” the contents of national budgets, taking away much of a power Parliament has exercised for centuries. Britain also seems likely to lose what remains of the EU budget rebate won by Mrs Thatcher, putting up our yearly contributions to the EU by another £3 billion – even though, for every £1 we get back from Brussels for our farmers, we already hand over £2 to farmers in other countries.

Theresa May, our Home Secretary, weakly claims that she wants reform of the European Arrest Warrant, when half of all those affected by it are being extradited from Britain. The EU’s response, in effect, is that we agreed to this travesty of justice and we must learn to live with it.

But no current issue better illustrates the bizarre nature of the system to which we have surrendered the power to run our country than the chaos inflicted on our hospitals by the enforced application of the EU’s working time directive. Led by John Black, head of the Royal College of Surgeons, medical professionals protest that this is threatening many patients’ lives.

Even the European Commission freely admits, in a recent “communication” to the European Parliament and sundry others, that its rules are, in practice, highly “unsatisfactory” and in need of urgent reform. But it adds that attempts to amend the directives have been going on since 2004 and that any chance of getting the reforms needed will involve so many consultations and negotiations that little is likely to happen for years.

Of course, if we still had the power to run our own country, this crisis in the NHS and much else besides could be sorted out within months, But since our Government seems quite happy to continue handing over even more powers to this crazy system, there is nothing we can do about it – until eventually the whole lumbering, labyrinthine, unaccountable, undemocratic mess implodes under the weight of its own contradictions.